If your neighbor’s house catches fire, is it wiser to call the fire department or to trust the good will of the flames to put themselves out?

Faced with strategic conflagrations scorching much of the globe, President Obama’s approach is to delay as long as possible then to attempt to negotiate with the blaze. If forced to act at last, he responds to wildfires with a water pistol.

For years, China has been constructing at least seven artificial islands atop reefs far from its mainland, in waters on which other countries have stronger claims. It’s a hostile takeover of the South China Sea with some of the most important sea lanes on the planet, vital in peace and war. The Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei, Japan and Taiwan looked to us for leadership.

Yet Obama has dithered like Hamlet. He should be nicknamed Bamlet. This situation has even greater resonance because it fits the Obama pattern of denial, delay, disarmament and defeat.

China’s Communist Party has scrapped its hated one-child policy (see Note below) in a bid to shore up political support, but the move comes far too late to avert a collapse of the workforce and a demographic crisis by the late 2020s.

All couples will be allowed to have a second child under new rules agreed at the party’s closely-watched 5th Plenum in Beijing. The ban on larger families in cities will remain despite pleas from Chinese academics for total freedom.

The policy shift will make no difference to the workforce for almost 20 years and by then China will already be in the full grip of a demographic crunch.

“They have merely moved to a two-child policy. The family planning authorities are still there, and there is still an apparatus of state power intruding into people’s intimate lives,” says Jonathan Fenby, a China veteran at Trusted Sources.

China may already have left it too late to ditch the one-child policy. Critics say the damage has been evident for years, leaving aside the traumatic suffering of poor women seized by police after tip-offs and forced into late-term abortions, the indignity of “menstrual monitors” and the status of “illegal” children denied ration coupons and schooling.

Innovation is a mysteriously difficult thing to dictate. Technology seems to change by a sort of inexorable, evolutionary progress, which we probably cannot stop—or speed up much either. And it’s not much the product of science.

Most technological breakthroughs come from technologists tinkering, not from researchers chasing hypotheses. Heretical as it may sound, “basic science” isn’t nearly as productive of new inventions as we tend to think.

The linear dogma so prevalent in the world of science and politics—that science drives innovation, which drives commerce—is mostly wrong. It misunderstands where innovation comes from. Indeed, it generally gets it backward.

 For more than a half century, it has been an article of faith that science would not get funded if government did not do it, and economic growth would not happen if science did not get funded by the taxpayer. This is a myth. In fact, there is still no empirical demonstration of the need for public funding of research and that the historical record suggests the opposite.