My Comments on Friedman's Trust Article

I'll kind of do some commentary of the commentary, meta-commentary. One journalist I read criticizing this piece claimed that Friedman suffers from ADD, what this critic claimed was that Friedman started with a thesis of trust and started gushing about Alibaba just because he met some players from the Company.

Reading the piece I understand the critic's point, but I see where Friedman makes the point that there's a lack of trust in China and that's holding it back in innovation, then offers that Alibaba works with trust and is facilitating innovation. 

I couple comments I have, about culture. The Communist party worked hard to destroy the family as the basic economic organization unit of China, trying to replace it with a state collective. The Great Leap Forward in China, where Chinese melted down useful utensils made of metal to "manufacture" steel that sat as useless lumps, saw the widescale starvation of millions. 

Despite the best efforts of the CCP, the family remains as the primary unit of trust of economy in China. Though greatly changed. I think what affects the family greatest in China is the one child policy. It has greatly curtailed the participants in a circle of trust. 

China remains a society just like any other where business requires trust. A trust that America could rely on so easily till we found out that the bankers we expected to safeguard our collective capital were just parasites and self-serving buccaneers. Doing business in China requires first cultivating a relationship, on whatever superficial level. It requires some form of social interaction, and it requires building social capital.

What Friedman really wants to talk about I think is IP protection and the widespread pirating of goods. China's always been practical culture, there are no devotional religions prevalent in the society for example. Chinese probably couldn't imagine making paper a proprietary technology, and I think the attitude extends to other useful tools. 

I think Open Source provides a great opportunity to align Chinese culture with the wider world. We can offer Chinese tools that are Open and Free as in freedom, and they can become contributors to tools that help everybody. If we can get China on board on a widescale with Open Source, I believe we'll end a reality where shovels that is prosaic tools to do basic work no longer cost $1,000,000.