Will China Dominate Late 21st Century Academic Economics?

Back in 1920, the Economic Journal had more cache than the AER or JPE or QJE. In 2080, will the CJE be the place that I'll be trying to publish? While I don't know if the China Journal of Economics (CJE) exists yet, The New York Times is debating whether the best universities in the U.S face a serious challenge from China's rising universities.

One doubter in the debate states; "China’s one-party state cannot produce world-class historians, economists, political thinkers or even demographers. Beijing’s increasing demand for obedience smothers creativity in many of the social sciences and “soft” disciplines."

At least in the case of applied micro economics, I don't know if this is true. When I was in Beijing in September, I was quite impressed by the empirical research agenda that professors at Tsinghua and Peking Univ were pursuing. They were able to run novel field experiments because they were in China. While I agree that some topics related to the monopolist state may be awkward to work on, I did not sense Big Brother's hand dictating what could and could not be said. Now, one could counter that applied micro nibles around the edges and doesn't really pose a challenge to the State.

Turning to the bigger question, will Harvard still be the world's top dog in the year 2100?

There are 7 billion people on this planet and 1.3 billion of them in China. Will the best and the brightest of the remaining 5.7 billion want to go to China or the U.S? The irony here is that if China's state squashes individual liberty and makes people feel trapped then this will help the U.S compete for talent. As I have argued many times, the footloose want quality of life. The United States is greener and offers more individual liberties than China. How much will this two dimensional gap narrow over time?

Now, objectively it appears that China will invest much more in its universities than the U.S. It remains an open question how large the endowment of schools such as Tsinghua and Peking will grow as some of their graduates become rich.

I must admit that I'm a pinch puzzled about what is the U.S's comparative advantage in the 21st century. I hope that my able son will be able to answer this question.

We also have not discussed technological innovation and how this will affect whether China replaces the U.S as the King of the Hill. By the late 21st century, tele-conference technology will be pretty good. Airplanes (if they still exist) will be faster so that one could travel from LA to Beijing in 3 hours? In such a flatter world, will the physical location of the world's best universities matter less?
Once an academic has established a reputation, one can live in a nice city and jet in for the occasional conference.

Ideas are public goods. Now if the researchers are dreaming up stuff with national security implications (bombs, plagues) then I understand why the location of where they are produced matters. But academic economics doesn't have this feel. We are an open source profession. People want to get their ideas out and get credit for them. Where they produce these ideas only matters if there are sharp increasing returns to scale from face to face communication. But, I can honestly say that I do not need to see your face to learn from you. I read quite fast and would prefer to read your work rather than to hear you describe it.

As long as Chinese economists write reasonably good english, I will follow their best guys' stuff.