Like, average people do not live off of technology improvement
They absolutely do. They literally live off of technology improvement, the Earth could not sustain as many people as it does without a long chain of technological improvement starting with chemical fertilizers. It doesn't get more stark than that.
This is the crux of our disagreement. You consider money to be the driving force of an economy while I consider it secondary. It's just a mechanism of distribution (a very unjust and inefficient one, but that's neither here nor there). What drives an economy is technology and the hands and minds that create it.
STEM grads don't mean much unless they are paid appropriate wages to actually do STEM work.
I have a problem parsing this sentence. "Appropriate wages" are socially constructed and have to do with the level of wealth of a country. Chinese scientists did STEM work decades ago when they commuted on bicycles, and they do it today when they drive BYDs.
If anything, that's much more of a problem in America where the best and brightest are siphoned off into parasitic fields like finance which create no value. Being a scientist or engineer there is half a step above failure and your career is considered socially mediocre at best. This is ultimately the reason why America's industrial economy is eviscerated and why the Pentagon pays $1,400 for coffee cups.
Chinese kids want to be astronauts and American kids want to be social media influencers. That has nothing to do with "appropriate wages", that has to do with superior and inferior cultures.
'Scaling technology' is not a function of just capacity to 'make' things - but also a capacity for there to be *demand* for things.
There's no such thing as abstract "demand." What's called demand is just a mechanism for distributing supply, it's not a concept with an independent existence. Supply is what creates demand.
Real estate at 20-30% of GDP was an immense driver of the two things you mentioned in the past.
A pathological state of affairs that is long overdue for a correction, the Chinese people have to be more imaginative with their money than blowing up housing bubbles. One of the best tools to correct this economic aberration and increase the government's revenue is a property tax. The housing market becomes rational, and the government has the resources to raise defense spending to 3-4% of GDP. Win-win.
So no, ironically, focusing on technology without focusing on commercialization is how you end up making things that people don't want.
What people want is socially constructed. To put it very bluntly, people want what they are told to want. And people shouldn't have everything they want because if they do, the result is America. I don't want China to be an nation of entitled TikTok twerkers and opioid addicts.
The Chinese government is very focused on commercialization. Everybody wants electricity and to not choke on coal fumes, so there's a drive to commercialize clean energy. Everybody wants a car, so there's a drive to commercialize EVs. Everybody wants electronics, so there's a drive to commercialize semiconductor tools.
There's enormous scope for entrepreneurship within the bounds the government has set. If some investors are too stupid to do anything except invest in real estate and e-commerce, that's their problem. They'll be wiped out and more intelligent investors will take their place and make their fortunes by strengthening China.
The USSR was amazing at generating technology and scaling technology too - they are necessary but not sufficient for a diversified/strong economy.
No, it wasn't. The Soviet Union's economy was crippled from the start and it failed precisely because it didn't generate and scale technology sufficiently. It had pockets of excellence like rocketry and nuclear energy, but it was a failure overall.
