Americans make the best software and films, and the Japanese the best cars and consumer electronics. There's a reason for this, and it goes far deeper than cultural differences or the quality of autoworkers, it has to do with who's in charge.

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About Paul Graham | Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple Bayesian spam filter that inspired most current filters. He is currently working on a new programming language called Arc. Paul is the author of On Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1993), ANSI Common Lisp (Prentice Hall, 1995), and Hackers & Painters (Reilly, 2004). He has an AB from Cornell and a PhD in Computer Science from Harvard, and studied painting at RISD and the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. His web site, got 3.7 million page views in 2004.