I grew up with China viewed as a third-world economy, spinning its wheels internally against corruption and the need to hide its internal ideological conflicts under layers of propaganda. If they were keeping pace in the global Cold War arms race, it was only because they were spying and stealing tech from the U.S. and Russia. Nevertheless, by 2010 China had muscled forward economically to eclipse Japan as the world's second largest economy. Currently China is leading the world with cutting edge advances in exotic tech like quantum entanglement and fusion power, as well as dominating clean power production, electric vehicles and batteries.

Three key policies led that transformation:
- Allowing private enterprise, which enabled foreign investment and trade
- "Special economic zones" relaxed regulations, taxation; plus enormous infrastructure investment
- Joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, further reducing trade friction

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When I worked at the sketchy college-planning company, there was an article passed around the office about "why has tuition inflated at 2-3x the rate of general inflation for decades". One prestigious college chancellor claimed it was due to demand for hotel-bar dorm facilities; that always smelled like a not-very-clever lie to me, but the article fell short of tendering any actual accessible, credible explanations.

Another failed explanation is the so-called Bennett Hypothesis: namely, blaming federal student loans for tuition creep. One of the longer-tenured marketing/operations managers at 123Sketchy.com made that claim a standard part of his training spiel to "affiliate" insurance salesmen. But the Brookings Institution (DC-based nonpartisan policy analysis org) debunked Bennett.

Since then, a few key credible explanations have come to the fore:
- Declining state and federal appropriations. Throughout my life, moneyed corporate interests have pressured government more and more to shift the burden of taxation from themselves to the working class. Less public funding = more revenue has to come from tuition.
- A subtle quirk of the education industry, which hasn't benefited from efficiency/productivity advances of tech progress the way manufacturing and service delivery have. But the ed.biz still has to compete with those industries to attract and retain faculty.
- Expansion of non-academic costs, e.g. counseling and health services, and bureaucracy.

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It was around 2006 that Alphabet's search engine captured 50% of the search market. It's had 2 decades to edge out competition. Part of how it did this was by offering free "Analytics" if you inserted some invisible HTML into your web pages, so that they fed G's voracious data monster with every page visit. I don't think I thought about it in these terms before - but 2 decades in, "search engine optimization" means 80%+ bowing to G's algorithm. Alphabet's search engine largely defines what it means for a web page or site to be "optimized" for search relevancy-ranking - and "optimized" or not, the Gmonster preferentially promotes its own entire ecosystem.

By similar tactics, Alphabet has quietly assumed control of pretty much the entire non-Apple smartphone industry. Android holds at least 70% of the market, Apple almost all the rest, with China's HarmonyOS significant only in China. Fairphone runs a de-tracker-ified (de-enshittified) fork of Android, but bucking all the tracking hooks in Chrome-on-stock-Droid comes with a stiff opportunity cost and Fairphone is always in danger of lagging behind stock-Droid's security patches. Fairphone's biggest market is Netherlands, where it holds only about 1/3 of 1% smartphone market share.