industrial policy – J. W. Mason

At Dissent: Industrial Policy without Nationalism

(This piece was published in the Fall 2024 issue of Dissent.)

In the first two years after Biden’s election, there was considerable enthusiasm on the left for the administration’s embrace of a larger, more active economic role for the federal government. I was among those who saw both the ambitions of the Build Back Better bill and the self-conscious embrace of industrial policy as an unexpectedly sharp break with the economic policy consensus of the past thirty years.

Biden squandered that early promise with his embrace of Israel’s campaign of mass murder in Gaza. His legacy will be the piles of shattered buildings and children’s corpses that he, with aides like Antony Blinken, did so much to create.

The administration has also struck a Trumpian note on immigration, promising to shut down the border to desperate asylum seekers. And internationally, it is committed to a Manichean view of the world where the United States is locked into a perpetual struggle for dominance with rivals like Russia and China.

Can industrial policy be salvaged from this wreckage? I am not sure.

There are really two questions here. First, is there an inherent connection between industrial policy and economic nationalism, because support for one country’s industries must comes at the cost of its trade partners? And second, is it possible in practice to pursue industrial policy without militarism? Or does it require the support of the national security establishment as the only sufficiently powerful constituency in favor of a bigger and more active government?

Much of the conversation around industrial policy assumes that one country’s gain must be another’s loss. U.S. officials insist on the need to outcompete China in key markets and constantly complain about how “unfair” Chinese support for its manufacturers disadvantages U.S. producers. European officials make similar complaints about the United States.

This zero-sum view of trade policy is shared by an influential strand of thought on the left, most notably Robert Brenner and his followers. In their view, the world economy faces a permanent condition of overcapacity, in which industrial investment in one country simply depresses production and profits elsewhere. In the uncompromising words of Dylan Riley, “the present period does not hold out even the hope of growth,” allowing only for “a politics of zero-sum redistribution.” Development, in this context, simply means the displacement of manufacturing in the rich countries by lower-cost competitors.

I don’t know if anyone in the Biden administration has read Brenner or been influenced by him. But there is certainly a similarity in language. The same complaints that Chinese investment is exacerbating global overcapacity in manufacturing could come almost verbatim from the State Department or from the pages of New Left Review. More broadly, there is a shared sense that China’s desire to industrialize is fundamentally illegitimate. The problem, Brenner complains, is that China and other developing countries have sought to “export goods that were already being produced” instead of respecting the current “world division of labor along Smithian lines” and focusing on exports complementary to existing industries in the North.

Fortunately, we can be fairly confident that this understanding of world trade is wrong.

The zero-sum vision sees trade flows as driven by relative prices, with lower-cost producers beating out higher-cost ones for a fixed pool of demand. But as Keynesian economists have long understood, the most important factor in trade flows is changes in incomes, not prices. Far from being fixed, demand is the most dynamic element in the system.

A country experiencing an economic boom – perhaps from a upsurge in investment – will see a rapid rise in both production and demand. Some of the additional spending will falls on imports; countries that grow faster therefore tend to develop trade deficits while countries that grow slowly tend to develop trade surpluses. (It is true that some countries manage to combine rapid growth with trade surpluses, while others must throttle back demand to avoid deficits. But as the great Keynesian economist A.P. Thirlwall argued, this is mainly a function of what kinds of goods they produce, rather than lower prices.)

We can see this dynamic clearly in the United States, where the trade deficit consistently falls in recessions and widens when growth resumes. It was even more important, though less immediately obvious, in Europe in the 2000s. During the first decade of the euro, Germany developed large surpluses with other European countries, which were widely attributed to superior competitiveness thanks to wage restraint and faster productivity growth. But this was wrong. While German surpluses with the rest of the European Union rose from 2 percent to 3 percent of German GDP during the 2000s, there was no change in the fraction of income being spent in the rest of the bloc on German exports. Meanwhile, the share of German income spent on EU imports actually rose.

If Germans were buying more from the rest of the European Union, and non-German Europeans were buying the same amount from Germany, how could it be that the German trade surplus with Europe increased? The answer is that total expenditure was rising much faster in the rest of Europe. Rising German surpluses were the result of austerity and stagnation within the country, not greater competitiveness. If Germany had adopted a program to boost green investment during the 2000s, its trade surpluses would have been smaller, not larger. The same thing happened in reverse after the crisis: the countries of Southern Europe rapidly closed their large trade deficits without any improvement in export performance, as deep falls in income and expenditure squeezed their imports.

Europe’s trade imbalances of a decade ago might seem far afield from current debates over industrial policy. But they illustrate a critical point. When a country adopts policies to boost investment spending, that creates new demand in its economy. And the additional imports drawn in by this demand are likely to outweigh whatever advantages it gains in the particular sector where investment is subsidized. Measures like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) or CHIPS and Science Act may eventually boost U.S. net exports in the specific sectors they target. But they also raise demand for everything else. This is why a zero-sum view of industrial policy is wrong. If the US successfully boosts investment in wind turbine production, say, it will probably boost net exports of turbines. But it will also raise imports of other things – not just inputs for turbines, but all the goods purchased by everyone whose income is raised by the new spending. For most US trade partners, the rise in overall demand will matter much more than greater US competitiveness in a few targeted sectors.

China might look like an exception to this pattern. It has combined an investment boom with persistent trade surpluses, thanks to the very rapid qualitative upgrading of its manufacturing base. For most lower- and middle-income countries, rapid income growth leads to a disproportionate rise in demand for more advanced manufactures they can’t make themselves. This has been much less true of China. As economists like Dani Rodrik have shown, what is exceptional about China is the range and sophistication of the goods it produces relative to its income level. This is why it’s been able to maintain trade surpluses while growing rapidly.

While Biden administration officials and their allies like to attribute China’s success to wage repression, the reality is close to the opposite. As scholars of inequality like Branko Milanovic and Thomas Piketty have documented, what stands out about China’s growth is how widely the gains have been shared. Twenty-first-century China, unlike the United States or Western Europe, has seen substantial income growth even for those at the bottom of the income distribution.

More important for the present argument, China has not just added an enormous amount of manufacturing capacity; it has also been an enormous source of demand. This is the critical point missed by those who see a zero-sum competition for markets. Consider automobiles. Already by 2010 China was the world’s largest manufacturer, producing nearly twice as many vehicles as the United States, a position it has held ever since. Yet this surge in auto production was accompanied by an even larger surge in auto consumption, so that China remained a net importer of automobiles until 2022. The tremendous growth of China’s auto industry did not come at the expense of production elsewhere; there were simply more cars being made and sold.

All this applies even more for the green industries that are the focus of today’s industrial policy debate. There has been a huge rise in production—especially but not only in China—but there has been an equally huge growth in expenditure. Globally, solar power generation increased by a factor of 100 over the past fifteen years, wind power by a factor of ten. And there is no sign of this growth slowing. To speak of excess capacity in this sector is bizarre. In a recent speech, Treasury Under Secretary Jay Shambaugh complained that China plans to produce more lithium-ion batteries and solar modules than are required to hit net-zero emissions targets. But if the necessary technologies come online fast enough, there’s no reason we can’t beat those targets. Is Shambaugh worried that the world will decarbonize too fast?

Even in narrow economic terms, there are positive spillovers from China’s big push into green technology. China may gain a larger share of the market for batteries or solar panels — though again, it’s important to stress that this market is anything but fixed in size — but the investment spending in that sector will create demand elsewhere, to the benefit of countries that export to China. Technological improvements are also likely to spread rapidly. One recent study of industrial policy in semiconductors found that when governments adopt policies to support their own industry, they are able to significantly raise productivity – but thanks to international character of chip production, productivity gains are almost as large for the countries they trade with. Ironically, as Tim Sahay and Kate Mackenzie observe, the United States stands to lose out on exactly these benefits thanks to the Biden administration’s hostility to investment by Chinese firms.

None of this is to say that other countries face no disruptions or challenges from China’s growth, or from policies to support particular industries in the United States or elsewhere. The point is that these disruptions can be managed. Lost demand in one sector can be offset by increased demand somewhere else. Subsidies in one country can be matched by subsidies in another. Indeed, in the absence of any global authority to coordinate green investment, a subsidy race may be the best way to hasten decarbonization.

As a matter of economics, then, there is no reason that industrial policy has to involve us-against-them economic nationalism or heightened conflict between the United States and China. As a matter of politics, unfortunately, the link may be tighter.

They are certainly linked in the rhetoric of the Biden administration. Virtually every initiative, it now seems, is justified by the need to meet the threat of foreign rivals. A central goal of the CHIPS Act is to not only reduce U.S. reliance on Chinese imports but to cut China off from technologies where the United States still has the lead. Meanwhile arms deliveries to Ukraine are sold as a form of stimulus. This bellicose posture is deeply written in the DNA of Bidenomics: before becoming Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan ran a think tank whose vision of “foreign policy for the middle class” was “Russia, Russia, Russia and China, China, China.”

Thea Riofrancos calls this mindset the “security-sustainability nexus.” Is its current dominance in U.S. politics a contingent outcome—the result, perhaps, of the particular people who ended up in top positions in the Biden administration? And if so, can we imagine a U.S. industrial policy where the China hawks are not in the driver’s seat? Or is the political economy of the United States one in which only a Cold War enemy can motivate a public project to reorient the economy?

In a recent paper, Benjamin Braun and Daniela Gabor argue for the second alternative. It is only “the salience of geopolitical competition” with China that has allowed the United States to go as far with industrial policy as it has. In the absence of much more popular pressure and a broader political realignment, they suggest, the only way that “green planners” can overcome the deep-seated resistance to bigger government is through an alliance with the “geopolitical hawks.”

Many of us have pointed to the economic mobilization of the Second World War as a model for a quick decarbonization of the U.S. economy through public investment. Wartime mobilization — the “greatest thing that man has ever done,” in the words of a contemporary Woody Guthrie song — offers an appealing model for decarbonization. It combines both the most rapid expansion and redirection of economic activity in U.S. history, and the closest the country has ever come to a planned economy. But given the already dangerous entanglement of industrial policy with war and empire, it’s a model we may not want to invoke.

On the other hand, the climate crisis is urgent. And the arguments that it calls for a more direct public role in steering investment are as strong as ever. It’s safe to say that neither the historic boom in new factory construction nor the rapid growth in solar energy (which accounts for the majority of new electrical generating capacity added in 2024) would have happened without the IRA. It’s easy to see how climate advocates could be tempted to strike a Faustian bargain with the national security state, if that’s the only way to get these measures passed.

Personally, I would prefer to avoid this particular deal with the devil. I believe we should oppose any policy aimed at strengthening the United States vis-à-vis China and flatly reject the idea that U.S. military supremacy is in the interest of humanity. An all-out war between the United States and China (or Russia) would be perhaps the one outcome worse for humanity than uncontrolled climate change. Even if the new Cold War can be kept to a simmer—and that’s not something to take for granted—the green side of industrial policy is likely to lose ground whenever it conflicts with national security goals, as we’ve recently seen with Biden’s tariffs on Chinese solar cells, batteries, and electric vehicles. The Democratic pollster David Shor recently tweeted that he “would much rather live in a world where we see a 4 degree rise in temperature than live in a world where China is a global hegemon.” Administration officials would not, presumably, spell it out so baldly, but it’s a safe bet that many of them feel the same way.

Adam Tooze observes somewhere that historically socialists often favored strictly balanced budgets — because they expected, not without reason, that the main beneficiary of lax fiscal rules would be the military. The big question about industrial policy today is whether that logic still applies, or whether an expansion of the state’s role in the economic realm can be combined with a diminution of its capacity for war.

China’s Economic Growth Is Good, Actually

(I write a monthlyish opinion piece for Barron’s. This one was published there in June. My previous pieces are here.)

Once upon a time, the promise of globalization seemed clear. In an economically integrated world, poor countries could follow the same path of development that the rich countries had in the past, leading to an equalization of global living standards. For mid-20th century liberals, restoring trade meant bringing the New Deal’s egalitarian model of economic development to a global stage. As Nebraska Senator Kenneth Wherry memorably put it, “With God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.”¹

For better and for worse, globalization has failed in its promise to deliver a planet of Kansas Cities. But Shanghai specifically is one place that it’s come through, and then some. As we debate the Biden administration’s new tariffs, let’s not lose sight of the fact that China’s industrialization is a very good thing for humanity. Indeed, it is the outstanding case of globalization’s promises being fulfilled.

For most of modern history, the gap between the global rich and global poor has only gotten wider. Though there are many tricky issues of measurement, most economic historians would agree with Branko Milanovic — perhaps the world’s foremost authority on the global distribution of income — that global inequality rose steadily for perhaps 200 years until 1980 or so. Since then, and particularly since 2000, there has been a sharp reversal of this trend; according to Milanovic, global income is probably more equally distributed today than at any time since the 19th century.

The reason for this remarkable turn toward equality? China.

According to Milanovic, the rise of China was almost singlehandedly responsible for the reduction in global inequality over the past 30 years. Thanks to its meteoric growth, the gap between the world’s rich and poor has closed substantially for the first time since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Almost all the fall in global inequality in recent decades is attributable to China. Source.

Convergence to rich-country living standards is extremely rare historically. Prior to China, the only major examples in modern times were Taiwan and South Korea. Much more typical are countries like the Philippines or Brazil. Sixty years ago, according to the World Bank, their per-capita incomes were 6 and 14 percent that of the USA, respectively. Today, they are … 6 and 14 percent of the USA. There were ups and downs along the way, but overall no convergence at all. Other poor countries have actually lost ground.

Or as Paul Johnson summarizes the empirical growth literature: “Poor countries, unless something changes, are destined to remain poor.”

China is not just an outlier for how rapidly it has grown, but for how widely the benefits of growth have been shared. One recent study of Chinese income distribution over 1988-2018 found that while growth was fastest for the top, even the bottom 5 percent of wage earners saw real income grow by almost 5 percent annually. This is faster than any group in the US over that period. Milanovic comes to an even stronger conclusion: The bottom half of the Chinese income distribution saw faster growth than those at the top.

Even studies that find rising inequality in China, find that even the lowest income groups there had faster income growth than any group in the US.

Thomas Piketty finds a similar pattern. “The key difference between China and the United States,” he writes, “is that in China the bottom 50 percent also benefited enormously from growth: the average income of the bottom 50 percent [increased] by more than five times in real terms between 1978 and 2015… In contrast, bottom 50 percent income growth in the US has been negative.”²

It’s clear, too, that Chinese growth has translated into rising living standards in more tangible ways. In 1970, Chinese life expectancy was lower than Brazil or the Philippines; today it is almost ten years longer. As the sociologist Wang Feng observes in his new book China’s Age of Abundance, Chinese children entering school in 2002 were 5-6 centimeters taller than they had been just a decade earlier – testimony to vast improvements in diet and living conditions. These improvements were greatest in poor rural areas.

How has China delivered on the promises of globalization, where so many other countries have failed? One possible answer is that it has simply followed the path blazed by earlier industrializers, starting with the United States. Alexander Hamilton’s Report on Manufacturers laid out the playbook: protection for infant industries, public investment in infrastructure, adoption of foreign technology, cheap but strategically directed credit. The Hamiltonian formula was largely forgotten in the United States once it had done its work, but it was picked up in turn by Germany, Japan, Korea and now by China. As the Korean development economist Ha-Joon Chang puts it, insistence that developing countries immediately embrace free trade and financial openness amounts to “kicking away the ladder” that the rich countries previously climbed.

Today, of course, the US is rediscovering these old ideas about industrial policy. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is something odd and unseemly about describing the same policies as devious manipulation when China uses them.

When John Podesta announced the formation of the administration’s White House Climate and Trade Task Force last month, he tried to draw a sharp line between industrial policy in the United States and industrial policy in China. We use “transparent, well-structured, targeted incentives,” he said, while they have “non-market policies … that have distorted the market.” Unlike us, they are trying to “dominate the global market,” and “creating an oversupply of green energy products.” Yet at the same time, the administration boasts that the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act will double the growth of clean energy investment so that “US manufacturers can lead the global market in clean energy.”

No doubt if you squint hard enough, you can make out a distinction between changing market outcomes and distorting them, or between leading the global market and dominating it. But it certainly seems like the difference is when we do it versus when they do.

The claim that China is creating a global “overcapacity” in green energy markets — often trotted out by tariff supporters — is particularly puzzling. Obviously, to the extent that there is global overcapacity in these markets, US investment contributes exactly as much as Chinese does — that is what the word “global” means.

More importantly, as many critics have pointed out, the world needs vastly more investment in all kinds of green technologies. It’s hard to imagine any context outside of the US-China trade war where Biden supporters would argue that the world is building too many solar panels and wind turbines, or converting too quickly to electric vehicles.

Not so long ago, the dominant view on the economics of climate change was that the problem was the “free rider” dynamic — the whole world benefits from reduced emissions, while the costs are borne only by the countries that reduce them. In the absence of a global government that can impose decarbonization on the whole world, the pursuit of national advantage through green investment may be the only way the free rider problem gets solved.

As development economist Dani Rodrik puts it: “Green industrial policies are doubly beneficial – both to stimulate the necessary technological learning and to substitute for carbon pricing. Western commentators who trot out scare words like ‘excess capacity,’ ‘subsidy wars,’ and ‘China trade shock 2.0’ have gotten things exactly backwards. A glut in renewables and green products is precisely what the climate doctor ordered.”³

The Biden administration is not wrong to want to support US manufacturers. The best answer to subsidies for green industries in China is subsidies for green industries in the US (and in Europe and elsewhere). In a world that is desperately struggling to head off catastrophic climate change, a subsidy race could harness international rivalry as a part of the solution. But that requires that competition be channeled in a positive-sum way.

Unfortunately, the Biden Administration seems to be choosing the path of confrontation instead. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration dealt with the wave of imported cars that threatened US automakers through a voluntary agreement with Japan to moderately reduce auto exports to the US, while encouraging investment here by Japanese automakers. Unlike the pragmatists around Reagan, the Biden team seems more inclined to belligerence. There’s no sign they even tried to negotiate an agreement, instead choosing unilateral action and framing China as an enemy rather than a potential partner.

Tellingly, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan is described (in Alexander Ward’s new book The Internationalists) as arguing that the US can make serious climate deals with other countries while “boxing China out,” a view that seems to have won out over the more conciliatory position of advisors like John Kerry. If Sullivan’s position is being described accurately, it’s hard to exaggerate how unrealistic and irresponsible it is. The US and China are by far the world’s two largest economies, not to mention its preeminent military powers. If their governments cannot find a way to cooperate, there is no hope of a serious solution to climate change, or to other urgent global problems.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with an American administration putting the needs of the United States first. And if it’s a mistake to treat China as an enemy, it would also be wrong to set them up as an ideal. One could make a long list of ways in which the current government of China falls short of liberal and democratic ideals. Still, it’s clear that China is being punished for its economic success rather than its political failures. Tellingly, the same month that the tariffs on China were announced, the Biden administration indicated that it would resume sales of offensive weapons to Saudi Arabia, whose government has nothing to learn from China about political repression or violence against dissidents.

The policy issues around tariffs are complicated. But let’s not lose sight of the big picture. The fundamental premises of globalization remain compelling today, even if attempts to realize them have often failed. First, no country is an island – today, especially, our most urgent problems can only be solved with cooperation across borders. Second, economic growth is not a zero sum game – there is not some fixed quantity of resources, or markets, available, so that one country’s gain must be another’s loss. And third, democracy spreads best via example and the free movement of ideas and people, not through conquest or coercion. We don’t have to endorse the whole classical case for free trade to agree that its proponents were right in some important ways.

China’s growth has been the clearest case yet of globalization’s promise that international trade can speed the convergence of poor countries with rich ones. The opportunity is still there for its broader promises to be fulfilled as well. But for that to happen, we in the United States must first accept that if the rest of the world catches up with us, that is something to be welcomed rather than feared.

Industrial Policy: Further Thoughts

(Cross-posted from my Substack. If you like this blog, why not subscribe to that too?)

I just returned from Bangalore, where Arjun and I spent an intense 10 days working on our book, and on another project which I’ll be posting about in due time. I’d never been to India before, and it was … a lot. It took me a while to put my finger on the overarching impression: not chaos, or disorder, but incongruity — buildings and activities right on top of each other that, in an American context, you’d expect to be widely separated in space or time. That, and the constant buzz of activity, and crowds of people everywhere. In vibes, if not in specifics, it felt like a city of back-to-back Times Squares. I imagine that someone who grew up there would find an American city, even New York, rather dull.

It’s a city that’s gone from one million people barely a generation ago to 8 million today, and is still growing. There’s a modern subway, clean, reliable and packed, with the open-gangway cars New York is supposed to switch to eventually. It opened 15 years ago and now has over 60 stations — I wish we could build like that here. But the traffic is awesome and terrifying. Every imaginable vehicle — handpainted trucks, overloaded and dangling with tassels and streamers; modern cars; vans carrying sheep and goats; the ubiquitous three-wheeled, open-sided taxis; the even more ubiquitous motorbikes, sometimes carrying whole families; and of course the wandering cows — with no stoplights or other traffic control to speak of, and outside the old central city, no sidewalks either. Crossing the street is an adventure.

I realize that I am very far from the first person to have this reaction to an Indian city. Some years ago Jim Crotty was here for some kind of event, and the institution he was visiting provided him with a driver. Afterwards, he said that despite all the dodging and weaving through the packed roads he never felt anything but safe and comfortable. But, he added, “I would never get into a car with that guy in the United States. He’d be so bored, he’d probably fall asleep.”

Varieties of industrial policy. The panel I moderated on industrial policy is up on YouTube, though due to some video glitch it is missing my introductory comments. Jain Family Institute also produced a transcript of the event, which is here.

It was a very productive and conversation; I thought people really engaged with each other, and everyone had something interesting to contribute. But it left me a bit puzzled: How could people who share broad political principles, and don’t seem to disagree factually about the IRA, nonetheless arrive at such different judgements of it?

I wrote a rather long blog post trying to answer this question.

The conclusion I came to was that the reason Daniela Gabor (and other critics, though I was mostly thinking of Daniela when I wrote it) takes such a negative view of the IRA is that she focuses on the form of interface between the state and production it embodies: subsidies and incentives to private businesses. This approach accepts, indeed reinforces, the premise that the main vehicle for decarbonization is private investment. Which means that making this investment attractive to private business owners, for which profitability is a necessary but not sufficient condition. If you don’t think the question “how do we solve this urgent social problem” should be immediately translated into “how do we ensure that business can make money solving the problem,” then the IRA deserves criticism not just on the details but for its fundamental approach.

I am quite sympathetic to this argument. I don’t think anyone on the panel would disagree with it, either normatively as a matter of principle or descriptively as applied to the IRA. And yet the rest of us, to varying degrees, nonetheless take a more positive view of the IRA than Daniela does.

The argument of the post was that this is because we focus more on two other dimensions. First, the IRA’s subsidies are directed to capital expenditure itself, rather than financing; this already distinguishes it from what I had thought of as derisking. And second the IRA’s subsidies are directed toward narrowly specified activities (e.g. battery production) rather than to some generic category of green or sustainable investment, as a carbon tax would be. I called this last dimension “broad versus fine-grained targeting,” which is not the most elegant phrasing. Perhaps I would have done better to call it indicative versus imperative targeting, tho I suppose people might have objected to applying the latter term to a subsidy. In any case, if you think the central problem is the lack of coordination among private investment decisions, rather than private ownership s such, this dimension will look more important.

Extending the matrix. The post got a nice response; it seems like other people have been thinking along similar lines. Adam Tooze restated the argument more gracefully than I did:

Mason’s taxonomy focuses attention on two axes: how far is industrial policy driven by direct state engagement v. how far does it operate at arms-length through incentives? On the other hand, how far is green industrial policy broad-brush offering general financial incentives for green investment, as opposed to more fine-grained focus on key sectors and technologies?

Skeptics like Daniel Gabor, Mason suggests, can be seen as placing the focus on the form of policy action, prioritizing the question of direct versus indirect state action. Insofar as the IRA operates by way of tax incentives it remains within the existing, hands-off paradigm. A big green state would be far more directly involved. Those who see more promise in the IRA would not disagree with this judgment as to form but would insist that what makes the IRA different is that it engages in relatively fine-grained targeting of investment in key sectors.

My only quibble with this is that I don’t think it’s just two dimensions — to me, broad versus narrow and capital expenditure versus financing are two independent aspects of targeting.

I should stress that I wrote the post and the table to clarify the lines of disagreement on the panel, and in some similar discussions that I’ve been part of. They aren’t intended as a general classification of industrial policy, which — if it can be done at all — would require much more detailed knowledge of the range of IP experiences than I possess.

Tooze offers his own additional dimensions:

The relationship of economic policy to the underlying balance of class forces.
The mediation of those forces through the electoral system …
The agenda, expertise & de facto autonomy of state institutions…

These are certainly interesting and important questions. But it seems to me that they are perhaps questions for a historian rather than for a participant. They will offer a very useful framework for explaining, after the fact, why the debate over industrial policy turned out the way that it did. But if one is engaged in politics, one can’t treat the outcome one is aiming at as a fact to be explained. Advocacy in a political context presumes some degree of freedom at whatever decision point it is trying to influence. One wouldn’t want to take this too far: It’s silly to talk about what policies “should” be if there is no one capable of adopting them. But it seems to me that by participating in a political debate within a given community, you are accepting the premise, on some level, that the outcome depends on reason and not the balance of forces.

That said, Tooze’s third point, about state institutions, I think does work in an advocacy context, and adds something important to my schema. Though it’s not entirely obvious which way it cuts. Certainly a lack of state capacity — both administrative and fiscal — was an important motivation for the original derisking approach, and for neoliberalism more broadly. But as Beth Popp Berman reminds us, simple prohibitions and mandates are often easier to administer than incentives. And if the idea is to build up state capacity, rather than taking it as a fact, then that seems like an argument for public ownership.

I’ve thought for years that this was a badly neglected question in progressive economics. We have plenty of arguments for public goods — why the government should ensure that things are provided in different amounts or on different terms than a hypothetical market would. We don’t have so many arguments for why, and which, things should be provided by the public. The same goes for public ownership versus public provisions, with the latter entailing non-market criteria and intrinsic motivation, with the civil service protections that foster it.

The case for public provisioning. One group of people who are thinking about these questions seriously are Paul Williams and his team at the Center for Public Enterprise. (Full disclosure: I sit on CPE’s board.) Paul wrote a blog post a couple weeks ago in response to some underinformed criticisms of public housing, on why public ownership is an important part of the housing picture. Looking at the problem from the point of view of the local government that are actually responsible for housing in the US, the problem looks a bit different than the perspective of national governments that I implicitly adopted in my post.

The first argument he makes for public ownership is that it economizes on what is often in practice the binding constraint on affordable housing, the fixed pot of federal subsidies. A public developer doesn’t need the substantial profit margin a private developer would expect; recovering its costs is enough. Public ownership also allows for, in my terms, more fine-grained targeting. A general program of subsidies or inclusionary zoning (like New York’s 421a tax credits) will be too lax in some cases, leaving affordable units on the table, and too stringent in others, deterring construction. A public developer can assess on a case by case basis the proportion and depth of affordable units that a given project can support. A third argument, not emphasized here but which Paul has made elsewhere, is that developing and operating public housing builds up the expertise within the public sector that is needed for any kind of transformative housing policy.

It’s telling but not surprising to see the but-this-one-goes-to-11 response to Paul’s post that all we need for more housing is land-use deregulation. Personally, I am quite sympathetic to the YIMBY position, and I know Paul is too. But it doesn’t help to oversell it. The problems of “not enough housing” and “not enough affordable housing” do overlap, but they are two distinct problems.

A somewhat different perspective on these questions comes from this report by Josh Wallack at Roosevelt, on universal childcare as industrial policy. Childcare doesn’t have some of the specific problems that industrial policy is often presented as the solution to – it doesn’t require specialized long-lived capital goods, or coordination across multiple industries. But, Wallack argues, it shares the essential element: We don’t think that demand on its own will call forth sufficient capacity, even with subsidies, so government has to intervene directly on the supply side, building up the new capacity itself. I’ve always thought that NYC’s universal pre-K was a great success story (both my kids benefited from it) that should be looked to as a model of how to expand the scope of the public sector. So I’m very glad to see this piece, which draws general lessons from the NYC experience. Wallack himself oversaw implementation of the program, so the report has a lot more detail on the specifics of implementation than you normally get. Very worth reading, if you’re at all interested in this topic.

One area where Wallack thinks the program could have done better is democratic participation in the planning process. This could be another dimension for thinking about industrial policy. A more political practice-oriented version of Tooze’s bullets would be to ask to what extent a particular program broadens or narrows the space for popular movements to shape policy. Of course the extent to which this is feasible, or even desirable, depends on the kind of production we’re talking about. In Catalyst, Matt Huber and Fred Stafford argue, persuasively in my view, that there is a tension between the need for larger-scale electricity transmission implied by the transition away from carbon, and the preference of some environmentalists for a more decentralized, locally-controlled energy system. I am less persuaded by their argument that the need for increased transmission and energy storage rule out a wholesale shift toward renewables; here as elsewhere, it seems to me, which obstacles you regard as insurmountable depend on where you want to end up.

The general point I would make is that politics is not about a final destination, but about a direction of travel. Whether or not we could have 100 percent renewable electricity — or 100 percent public ownership of housing, or whatever — is not so important. What matters is whether we could have substantially more than we have now.

On other topics.

Showing the inconsistencies between conservative free-market economics and actual conservative politics is, in my experience, much harder in practice than it seems like it ought to be, at least if you want to persuade people who actually hold one or both. So it’s fun to see Brian Callaci’s (excellent) arguments against non-compete agreements in ProMarket, the journal of the ur-Chicago Stigler Center.

Garbriel Zucman observes that the past few years have seen very large increases in the share of income at the very top, which now seems to have passed its gilded age peak. Does this mean that I and others have been wrong to stress the gains for low-wage workers from tight post-pandemic labor markets? I don’t think so — both seem to be true. According to Realtime Inequality, the biggest income gains of the past two years have indeed gone to the top 1 percent and especially its top fractiles. But the next biggest gains have gone to the bottom half, which has outpaced the top 10 percent and comfortably outpaced the middle 40 percent. Their income numbers don’t further break out the bottom half, but given that the biggest wage gains have come a the very bottom, I suspect this picture would get even stronger if we looked further down the distribution.

This may well be a general pattern. The incomes that rise fastest in an economic boom are those that come from profits, on the one hand, and flexible wages that are strongly dependent on labor-market conditions on the other. People whose income comes from less commodified labor, with more socially embedded wage-setting, will be relatively insulated from swings in demand, downward but also upward. This may have something to do with the negative feeling about the economy among upper-middle class households that Emily Stewart writes about in Vox.

I’m still hoping to write something more at length about the debates around “greedflation” and price controls. But in the meantime, this from Servaas Storm is very good.

What I’ve been reading. On the plane to Bangalore, I finished Enzo Traverso’s Fire and Blood. I suppose it’s pretty common now to talk about the period from 1914 to 1945 as a unit, a second Thirty Years War. Traverso does this, but with the variation of approaching it as a European civil war — a war within a society along lines of class and ideology, rather than a war between states. A corollary of this, and arguably the animating spirit of the book, is the rehabilitation of anti-fascism as a positive political program. It’s a bit different from the kind of narrative history I usually read; the organization is thematic rather than chronological, and the focus is on culture — there are no tables and hardly any numbers, but plenty of reproductions of paintings. It reads more like a series of linked essays than a coherent whole, but what it lacks in overarching structure in makes up with endless fascinating particulars. I liked it very much.

Varieties of Industrial Policy

I was on a virtual panel last week on industrial policy as derisking, in response to an important new paper by Daniela Gabor. For me, the conversation helped clarify why people who have broadly similar politics and analysis can have very different feelings about the Inflation Reduction Act and similar measures elsewhere.

There are substantive disagreements, to be sure. But I think the more fundamental issue is that while we, inevitably, discuss the relationship between the state, the organization of production and private businesses in terms of alternative ideal types, the actual policy alternatives are often somewhere in the fuzzy middle ground. When we deal with a case that resembles one of our ideal types in some ways, but another in other ways, our evaluation of it isn’t going to depend so much on our assessment of each of these features, but on which of them we consider most salient.

I think this is part of what’s going on with current discussions of price controls. There has been a lot of heated debate following Zach Carter’s New Yorker profile of Isabella Weber on whether the energy price regulation adopted by Germany can be described as a form of price controls. Much of this criticism is clearly in bad faith. But the broad space between orthodox inflation-control policy, on the one hand, and comprehensive World War II style price ceilings, on the other, means that there is room for legitimate disagreement about how we describe policies somewhere in the middle. If you think that the defining feature of price regulation is that government is deciding how much people should pay for particular commodities, you will probably include the German policy. If you’re focused on other dimensions of it, you might not.

I am not going to say more about this topic now, though I hope to return to it in the future. But I think there is something parallel going on in the derisking debate.

People who talk about industrial policy mean some deliberate government action to shift the sectoral composition of output — to pick winners and losers, whether at the industry or firm level. But of course, there are lots of ways to do this. (Indeed, as people sometimes point out, governments are always doing this in some way — what distinguishes “industrial policy” is that it is visible effort to pick different winners.) Given the range of ways governments can conduct industrial policy, and their different implications for larger political-economy questions, it makes sense to try to distinguish different models. Daniela Gabor’s paper was a very helpful contribution to this.

The problem, again, is that models are ideal types — they identify discrete poles in a continuous landscape. We need abstractions like this — there’s no other way to talk about all the possible variation on the multiple dimensions on which we can describe real-world situations. If the classification is a good one, it will pick out ways in which variation on one dimension is linked to variation on another. But in the real world things never match up exactly; which pole a particular point is closer to will depend on which dimension we are looking at.

In our current discussions of industrial policy, four dimensions seem most important — four questions we might ask about how a government is seeking to direct investment to new areas. Here I’ll sketch them out quickly; I’ll explore them in a bit more detail below.

First is ownership — what kind of property rights are exercised over production? This is not a simple binary. We can draw a slope from for-profit private enterprises, to non-profits, to publicly-owned enterprises, to direct public provision.

Second is the form of control the government exercises over investment (assuming it is not being carried out directly by the public sector). Here the alternatives are hard rules or incentives, the latter of which can be positive (carrots) or negative (sticks).

The third question is whether the target of the intervention is investment in the sense of creation of new means of production, or investment in the sense of financing.

The last question is how detailed or fine-grained the intervention is — how narrowly specified are the activities that we are trying to shift investment into and out of?

“Derisking” in its original sense had specific meaning, found in the upper right of the table. The idea was that in lower-income countries, the binding constraint on investment was financing. Because of limited fiscal capacity (and state capacity more generally), the public sector should not try to fill this gap directly, but rather to make projects more attractive to private finance. Offering guarantees to foreign investors would make efficient use of scarce public resources, while trusting profit motive to guide capital to socially useful projects.

In terms of my four dimensions, this combines private ownership and positive incentives with broad financial target.

The opposite case is what Daniela calls the big green state. There we have public ownership and control of production, with the state making specific decisions about production on social rather than monetary criteria.

For the four of us on the panel, and for most people on the left, the second of these is clearly preferable to the first. In general, movement from the upper right toward the lower left is going to look like progress.

But there are lots of cases that are off the diagonal. In general, variation on each of these dimensions is independent of variation on the others. We can imagine real world cases that fall almost anywhere within the grid.

Say we want more wind and solar power and less dirty power.

We could have government build and operate new power plants and transmission lines, while buying out and shutting down old ones.

We could have a public fund or bank that would lend to green producers, along with rules that would penalize banks for holding assets linked to dirty ones.

We could have regulations that would require private producers to reduce carbon emissions, either setting broad portfolio standards or mandating the adoption of specific technologies.

Or we could have tax credits or similar incentives to encourage voluntary reductions, which again could be framed in a broad, rules-based way or incorporate specific decisions about technologies, geography, timelines, etc.

As we evaluate concrete initiatives, the hard question may not be where we place them in this grid nor on where we would like to be, but how much weight we give to each dimension.

The neoliberal consensus was in favor of private ownership and broad, rules-based incentives, for climate policy as in other areas. A carbon price is the canonical example. For those of us on the panel, again, the consensus is that the lower left corner is first best. But at the risk of flattening out complex views, I think the difference between let’s say Daniela on one side and Skanda Amarnath (or me) on the other is the which dimensions we prioritize. Broadly speaking, she cares more about movement in horizontal axis, as I’ve drawn the table, with a particular emphasis on staying off of the right side. While we care more about vertical axis, with a particular preference for the bottom row.

Some people might say it doesn’t matter how you manage investment, as long as you get the clean power. But here I am completely on (what I understand to be) Daniela’s side. We can’t look at policy in isolation, but have to see it as part of a broader political economy, as part of the relationship between private capital and the state. How we achieve our goals here matters for more than the immediate outcome, it shifts the terrain on which next battle will be fought.

But even if we agree that the test for industrial policy is whether it moves us toward a broader socialization of production, it’s not always easy to evaluate particular instances.

Let’s compare two hypothetical cases. In one, government imposes strict standards for carbon emissions, so many tons per megawatt. How producers get there is up to them, but if they don’t, there will be stiff fines for the companies and criminal penalties for their executives. In the second case, we have a set of generous tax credits. Participation is voluntary, but if the companies want the credits they have to adopt particular technologies on a specified schedule, source inputs in a specified way, etc.

Which case is moving us more in the direction of the big green state? The second one shifts more expertise and decision making into the public sector, it expands the domain of the political not just to carbon emissions in general but to the organization of production. But unlike the first, it does not challenge the assumption that private profitability is the first requirement of any change in the organization of production. It respects capital-owners’ veto, while the first does not.

(Neoliberals, it goes without saying, would hate both — the first damages the business climate and discourages investment, while the second distorts market more.)

Or what about if we have a strict rule limiting the share of “dirty” assets in the portfolios of financial institutions? This is the path Europe seems to have been on, pre IRA. In our discussion, Daniela suggested that this might have been better, since it had more of an element of discipline — it involved sticks rather than just subsidy carrots. To Skanda or me, it looks weak compared with the US approach, both because it focuses on financing rather than real investment, and because it is based on a broad classification of assets rather than trying to identify key areas to push investment towards. (It was this debate that crystallized the idea in this post for me.)

Or again, suppose we have a sovereign wealth fund that takes equity stakes in green energy producers, as Labour seems to be proposing in the UK. How close is this to direct public provision of power?

In the table, under public ownership, I’ve distinguished public provision from public enterprise. The distinction I have in mind is between a service that is provided by government, by public employees, paid for out of the general budget, on the one hand; and entities that are owned by the government but are set up formally as independent enterprises, more or less self-financing, with their own governance, on the other. Nationalizing an industry, in the sense of taking ownership of the existing businesses, is not the same as providing something as a public service. To some people, the question of who owns a project is decisive. To others, a business where the government is the majority stakeholder, but which operates for profit, is not necessarily more public in a substantive sense than a business that isprivately owned but tightly regulated.

Moving to the right, government can change the decisions of private businesses by drawing sharp lines with regulation — “you must”; “you must not” — or in a smoother way with taxes and subsidies. A preference for the latter is an important part of the neoliberal program, effectively shifting the trading -off of different social goals to the private sector; there’s a good discussion of this in Beth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist. On the other side, hard rules are easier to enforce and better for democratic accountability — everybody knows what the minimum wage is. Of course there is a gray area in between: a regulation with weak penalties can function like a tax, while a sufficiently punitive tax is effectively a regulation.

Finally, incentives can be positive or negative, subsidies or taxes. This is another point where Daniela perhaps puts more stress than I might. Carrots and sticks, after all, are ways of getting the mule to move; either way, it’s the farmer deciding which way it goes. That said, the distinction certainly matters if fiscal capacity is limited; and of course it matters to business, who will always want the carrot.

On the vertical axis, the big distinction is whether what is being targeted is investment in the sense of the creation of new means of production, or investment in the sense of financing. Let’s step back a bit and think about why this matters.

There’s a model of business decision-making that you learn in school, which is perhaps implicitly held by people with more radical politics. Investment normally has to be financed; it involves the creation of real asset and a liability, which is held somewhere in financial system. You build a $10 million wind turbine, you issue a $10 million bond. Which real investment is worth doing, then, will depend on the terms on which business can issue liabilities. The higher the interest rate on the bond, the higher must be the income from the project it finances, to make it worth issuing.

Business, in this story, will invest in anything whose expected return exceeds their cost of capital; that cost of capital in turn is set in financial markets. From this point of view, a subsidy or incentive to holders of financial assets is equivalent to one to the underlying activity. Telling the power producer “I’ll give you 10 percent of the cost of the turbine you built” and telling the bank “I’ll give you 10 percent of the value of the bond you bought” are substantively the same thing.

As I said, this is the orthodox view. But it also implicitly underlies an analysis that talks about private capital without distinguishing between “capital” as a quantity of money in financial form, and “capital” as the concrete means of production of some private enterprise. If you don’t think that the question “what factory should I build” is essentially the same as the question “which factory’s debt should I hold?”, then it doesn’t make sense to use the same word for both.

Alternatively, we might argue that the relevant hurdle rate for private investment is well above borrowing costs and not very sensitive to them. Investment projects must pass several independent criteria and financing is often not the binding constraint. The required return is not set in financial markets; it is well above the prevailing interest rate and largely insensitive to it. If you look at survey evidence of corporate investment decisions, financing conditions seem to have very little to do with it. If this is true, a subsidy to an activity is very different from a subsidy to financial claims against that activity. (A long-standing theme of this blog is the pervasive illusion by which a claim on an income from something is equated with the thing itself.)

Daniela defines derisking as, among other things, “the production of inevitability”, which I think is exactly right as a description of the (genuine and important) trend toward endlessly broadening the range of claims that can be held in financial portfolios. But I am not convinced it is a good description of efforts to encourage functioning businesses to expand in certain directions. Even though we use the word “invest” for both.

Conversely, when financing is a constraint, as it often is for smaller businesses and households, it takes the form of being unable to access credit at all, or a hard limit on the quantity of financing available (due to limited collateral, etc.), rather than the price of it. One lesson of the Great Recession is that credit conditions matter much more for small businesses than for large ones. So to the extent that we want to work through financing, we need to be targeting our interventions at the sites where credit constraints actually bind. (The lower part of the top row, in terms of my table.) A general preference for green assets, as in Europe, will not achieve much; a program to lend specifically for, say, home retrofits might.

This leads to the final dimension, what I am calling fine-grained versus broad or rules-based interventions. (Perhaps one could come up with better labels.) While for some people the critical question is ownership, for others — including me — the critical question is market coordination versus public coordination. It is whether we, as the government, are consciously choosing to shift production in specific ways, or whether we are setting out broad priorities and letting prices and the profit motive determine what specific form they will take. This — and this may be the central point of this post — cuts across the other criteria. Privately-owned firms can have their investment choices substantively shaped by the public. Publicly-owned firms can respond to the market.

Or again, yes, one way of distinguishing incentives is whether they are positive or negative. But another is how precise they are — in how much detail they specify the behavior that is to be punished or rewarded. A fine-grained incentive effectively moves discretion about specific choices and tradeoffs to the entity offering the incentive. A broad incentive leaves it to the receiver. An incentive conditioned on X shifts more discretion to the public sector than an incentive conditioned on any of X, Y or Z, regardless of whether the incentive is a positive or negative.

Let me end with a few concrete examples.

In her paper, Daniela draws a sharp distinction between the IRA and CHIPS Act, with the former as a clear example of derisking and the latter a more positive model. The basis for this is that CHIPS includes penalties and explicit mandates, while the IRA is overwhelmingly about subsidies.⁴. This is reflected in the table by CHIPS’ position to the left of the IRA. (Both are areas rather than points, given the range of provisions they include.) From another point of view, this is a less salient distinction; what matters is that they are both fairly fine-grained measures to redirect the investment decisions of private businesses. If you focus on the vertical axis they don’t look that different.

Similarly, Daniela points to things like the ECB’s climate action plan, which creates climate disclosure requirements for bank bond holdings and limits the use of carbon-linked bonds as collateral, as a possible alternative to the subsidy approach. It is true that these measures impose limits and penalties on the private sector, as opposed to the bottomless mimosas of the IRA. But the effectiveness of these measures would require a strong direct link from banks’ desired bond holdings, to the real investment decisions of productive businesses. I am very skeptical of such a link; I doubt measures like this will have any effect on real investment decisions at all. To me, that seems more salient.

The key point here is that Daniela and I agree 100% both that private profit should not be the condition of addressing public needs, and that the public sector does need to redirect investment toward particular ends. Where we differ, I think, is on which of those considerations is more relevant in this particular case.

If the EPA succeeds in imposing its tough new standards for greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, that will be an example of a rules-based rather than incentive-based policy. This is not exactly industrial policy — it leaves broad discretion to producers about how to meet the standards. But it is still more targeted than a carbon tax or permit, since it limits emissions at each individual plant rather than allowing producers to trade off lower emissions one place for higher emissions somewhere else.

Finally, consider the UK Labour Party’s proposal for a climate-focused National Wealth Fund, or similar proposals for green banks elsewhere. The team at Common Wealth has a very good discussion of how this could be a tool for actively redirecting credit as part of a broader green industrial policy. But other supporters of the idea stress ownership stakes as an end in itself. This is similar to the language one hears from advocates of social wealth funds: The goal is to replace private shareholders with the government, without necessarily changing anything about the companies that the shares are a claim on. ⁵ From this point of view, there’s a critical difference between whether the fund or bank has an equity stake in the businesses it supports or only makes loans.

To me, that doesn’t matter. The important question is does it acts as an investment fund, buying the liabilities (bonds or shares or whatever) of established business for which there’s already a market? Or does it function as more of a bank, lending directly to smaller businesses and households that otherwise might not have access to credit? This would require a form of fine-grained targeting, as opposed to buying a broad set of assets that fit some general criteria.⁶ Climate advocate showing to shape the NWF need to think carefully about whether it’s more important for it to get ownership stakes or for it to target its lending to credit-constrained businesses.

My goal in all this is not to say that I am right and others are wrong (though obviously I have a point of view). My goal is to try to clarify where the disagreements are. The better we understand the contours of the landscape, the easier it will be to find a route toward where we want to go.

At Substack: The End of Laissez Faire

(I wrote this post about two weeks ago, but then took a while getting the Substack actually launched. Going forward, hopefully the content will be more timely. All substack content is free; you can subscribe to the newsletter version here. Hopefully the content will be more timely in the future!)

Sometimes I think being a normal economist must be like one of those classic office jobs. You drive to work, park in the garage, take the elevator up to your office. You take some papers from your inbox and put them in your outbox. There’s the research frontier; ok, we’ve advanced it a little bit. Then the bell rings, quitting time. Whereas here in the heterodox world, it’s like you’ve let yourself in through a gap in the fence and you’re wondering, is this place a construction site, or is something being demolished, or is it an archaeological dig? I think this is my desk, but it could be some weird art object, or possibly part of the ventilation system. This person in the hallway — are they the boss, or a customer, or maybe someone in need of emergency medical assistance? Am I sure I have a job? Am I even supposed to be in here?

Well then. Back to work!

The question of the moment is industrial policy. Not so long ago, the consensus on climate policy, at the high table at least, was that carbon pricing was it. Government provides the public interest with an abstract monetary representation, and then private businesses (or “markets”) will translate that representation into whatever concrete changes to production are called for. In recent years, though, the debate seems to have been shifting rather rapidly towards what I have called an investment-focused approach. The passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (along with other similar measures) seems to mark a decisive turn toward industrial policy, in the US at least. This is not only about climate — the disruptions to global supply chains during the pandemic and, more worryingly, a renewed sense of rivalry with China, have strengthened the case for support for key sectors of the economy.

(Full disclosure: When someone mentioned to me early in the Biden administration that there was interest in dealing with the chip shortage by fostering a US industry, I thought it was a silly idea that would go nowhere. This was, it seemed to me, about the worst case for policy — a problem that was at once both extraordinarily hard for government to solve, and likely to take care of itself on its own before long. Shows you how much I know! — or perhaps, how much things have changed.)

The case for industrial policy, obviously, involves a reevaluation of the capacity of government and the problems it is expected to solve — what Keynes, in an essay whose title can be repurposed today, called the line between agenda and non-agenda. But it also, a bit less obviously, involves a shift in how we think about the economy. An economy where industrial policy makes sense is not one that can be usefully described in terms of a unique, stable equilibrium toward which decentralized decisionmakers will converge. Industrial policy only makes sense in a world where increasing returns and learning by doing create significant path dependence — what we are good at today depends on what we were doing yesterday — and where an uncertain future and the need for large, irreversible investments, and the prevalence of complementarity rather than substitution, creates coordination problems that markets are unable to solve. I don’t know that the drafters of the IRA were conscious of it, but they were implicitly endorsing a very different model of the economy than the one that one finds in textbooks.

Supply constraints. My big recent publication, coauthored as usual with Arjun Jayadev, is an article in the Review of Keynesian Economics called “Rethinking Supply Constraints.” It addresses exactly this issue. The one-sentence summary is that it makes more sense to think of the productive capacity of the economy in terms of a speed limit — a limit on the rate at which output and employment can grow — rather than an absolute ceiling, as in conventional measures of potential output. This, we argue, fits better with a wide range of empirical phenomena. Equally important, it fits better with a vision of the economy as an open-ended collective transformation of the world, as opposed to the allocation of an existing basket of stuff.

There’s a summary in this blogpost, and video of my presentation of it at the University of Massachusetts is here. (I start around 47 minutes in.) I will try to write more about it in this newsletter soon.

Low rates and bubbles. My latest Barron’s piece (I write one more or less monthly) was on whether the post-2007 decade of low interest rates can be blamed for Sam Bankman-Fried and financial bubbles and frauds more generally. As always, when the headline is a question, the answer is no.

I don’t think I quite stuck the landing with this one. The big point I should have hammered on is that if abundant credit ends up supporting projects that are socially and privately worthless, that’s a problem. But it is a problem with the institutions whose job it is to allocate credit, not with low interest rates or abundant credit as such. If banks and bank-like institutions can borrow at lower rates, it’s easy to see why they’d lend to projects with lower returns. It’s harder to see why they’d lend to projects with negative returns. The idea, evidently, is that for some reason when interest rates are too low financial-market participants will make choices that are not only socially costly but costly to themselves as well. The low rates-cause-bubbles arguments almost amount to a kind of financial terrorism — give us the risk-free returns we were counting on, or we’ll blow up our portfolios, and some chunk of the economy along with it.

The connection to industrial policy? If we don’t trust financial markets to make investment decisions, that strengthens the case for a bigger public role.

Biden, Brenner, and Benanav. Robert Brenner’s frequent collaborator Dylan Riley wrote a piece in the NLR blog Sidecar, drawing on Brenner’s work to argue that industrial policy is hopeless because of global overcapacity; you’ve got to seize the commanding heights or stay home. I don’t agree. I think there are ways that the socialist project can be advanced via Biden administration initiatives like the IRA, and wrote a piece for Jacobin explaining why.

Some people liked it — Adam Tooze gave it a nice mention in one of his newsletters. Others did not. Aaron Benanav wrote a long and rather irritated rebuttal in New Left Review. I disagree with a lot of what he wrote, which is fine; he, as he made very clear, disagreed with what I wrote. As the protagonist of James Salter’s great Korean War novel The Hunters says, “You shoot at them, they shoot at you. What could be fairer?” But I am a little annoyed that my jaunty Hamilton reference, intended to warn against the danger of imagining that you are in a position of power, got turned into evidence that I myself dream of being in the “room where it happens.” That seems unsporting.

I talked about my piece and the larger debate with Doug Henwood on his excellent Behind the News podcast. I will also be writing a piece for NLR that will be in part a response to Benanav but mostly, I hope, an intervention to move the debate in a more positive direction.

Speaking of Korea. I was on an English-language Korean news show recently, talking about the IRA. The video is here; a twitter thread summarized the points I was trying to make is here. An implicit background point, also very relevant to my objections to the Brenner-Riley-Benanav position, is that trade flows respond mostly to income, not relative prices. How much the US imports from Korea is to a first approximation a function of US GDP growth; subsidies (and exchange rates) are distinctly secondary.

What I am reading. I just finished the novel Variations on Night and Day, by Abdelrahman Munif. It’s the third novel in the Cities of Salt trilogy, though the first chronologically. The first novel, also called Cities of Salt, is about people in a fictional Middle Eastern Country (more or less Saudi Arabia) in the early days of the oil boom. It’s an extraordinary book in many ways, including its use of mostly collective protagonists — large parts of the narration are from the point of view of “the villagers”, “the workers” and so on. The second book, The Trench, moves up the social scale, focusing on the various schemers, strivers, climbers and entrepreneurs – business and political – who accrete around the monarchy’s capital. It’s got an ensemble, rather than collective cast, with one central character and an endless number of minor ones – it would make a great tv show. (Think a gulf-monarchy version of Hillary Mantel’s Cromwell novels.) The third book — Variations on Night and Day — moves up the social scale again, and back in time, to the earlier life of the sultan whose death occurs at the very beginning of The Trench. It’s a great book, gripping as narrative and morally serious. It provides what science fiction and fantasy promise but very seldom deliver, an immersive experience of a world very different from our own. Still I have to say, I somewhat preferred the first two books. At the end of the day, sultans are just not that interesting.

ETA: As it happens, I went to graduate school with Munif’s son Yasser. He was in the sociology department while I was in economics and we used to hang out quite a bit, tho I haven’t seen him in some years.