The answer is simple, "we" is the American people. We encouraged it through a government that decided to invest in the three areas for the simple purpose of addressing a great need, which after WWII was to stave off a nuclear war, whether real or perceived, no matter. How did that happen? It happened when FDR allowed Dr. Vannebar Bush to direct the Office of Scientific Research and Development, and form what is known as the "iron triangle", which is comprised by the partnership between academia, industry and the military that has driven the most infrastructural innovations in this country since the manhattan project. You say basic research is a source of economic competitiveness, it is certainly that, but not ONLY that, for this would be a very narrow view of its effects. Basic research also has the effect of producing key ideas, findings and innovations that pave the way for knowledge and technologies that can solve the problems facing a nation way beyond the economic needs of the time, and whose potential is seen many years before they become economically viable. Take the PLATO project at the University of Illinois for example. For the duration of its lifetime, the project was a military and tax-payer money sink, however, it pioneered concepts and innovations that eventually became some of the founding blocks of the modern web. As far as the question is concerned, I think you are either misreading it or deliberately interpreting it so as to make a political point. Its main premise is not that the value of a technology is in the amount of jobs needed to support it, rather, it's value lies in the beneficial outcomes it can bring to society, among them the creation of new industries capable of producing jobs.

It all depends on what one sees as improvement, don't you think?

Well said, I have spent a substantial number of years studying online communities and the way that "knowledge" emerges in them. While it is a noble effort on the part of wikipedia to allow the common man to contribute to collective knowledge, when push comes to shove politics always overrules contribution, and in many cases even data-backed facts. But that's the story of humanity, and I don't think anyone has a better model, as long as we're still human IMHO

I think you need to see even further. The bottom line is that China has no one by the balls but itself. When Clinton and the republicans opened China's floodgates, they did it consciously knowing that manufacturing jobs were gonna jump there. More importantly, they knew that they could run a nearly unltimited credit line with them, with no intention to ever pay it back because of one and one thing alone: military might. China has a million man army, but not enough vehicles to move it or food to feed it. China needs the US even more than the US needs China, and this is why they keep bailing it out like an abused wife tolerates a beating husband. The US is moving to Afghanistan not because of the mythical war on terror, but because it is an effective way to limit China-Russia economic alliances. The US signs a nuclear weapons pact with India in order to have an ally in the region capable of making China think twice about any military intentions. Just take a look at military capability and budgets, and you'll know where the true game is. With a global economy, the riches are not even in the pockets of the Chinese government, but of the transnational corporations that it has been letting into its soil. And now its problem is even more complex, for it has been using the rhetoric of ultranationalism to keep its middle class' eyes wide shut to the enslavement of its own people. How long that will last is up to the Chinese I think.

Yep, this is as long as they have ANY source of running water, or air to breathe, for millions of chinese still die from this alone. In fact, at the rate they are going, not only them, but US as well will see the consequences of such irrational and unreasonable growth at the cost of quality of life. See this article in Mother Jones Magazine for some more fun statistics: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2007/12/last-empire-chinas-pollution-problem-goes-global As for the statistics on poverty, I come from a so-called in-development country. Moving out of poverty in that context translates from living of one's own meager resources off the land, to living as an indentured servant with someone else's boot over your head (but with pseudo-clean water) for generations to come. But statistics love ignoring these facts. Global environmental decay, disease and famine wont.

Indeed, corrupt government officials in China have for years been selling arable land to developers and corporations to expand the megacities they now have. As such, substinence farming is no longer an option for millions of Chinese, not because they think slave factory life would be better. Of course, as with most other third world countries (especially those who live under the illusion they're not 3rd world) there is a small group of elite Chinese (proportionally speaking, about 100m out of 1.5bn approx) who hoard and control the wealth, land and means of production. Those are the folks who are sustaining an unsustainable lifestyle, those are the folks who can wake up "the sleeping dragon" like in Tianamen, and those are the folks the Communist Party lives in terror of.

Yep, and this idea started with something called "Le Terreur", where a lot of (especially rich) heads fell after decades of popular abuse.