What’s Industrial Policy?
Everybody from Elizabeth Warren to Marco Rubio is talking about industrial policy.
“Isn’t that something from the 1980s?” and “Is this the white male manufacturing policy thing?”, you ask.
Wrong and wrong. My new report explains why. Thread 👇 (rooseveltinstitute.org/industrial-pol…)
The US has always had an industrial policy, which we define as a horizontal lever to influence the allocation of capital and labor between industries.
We contrast this with more traditional fiscal and monetary policy — each of which has both domestic and international dimensions
What the US has lacked is industrial planning. Instead, we’ve had an ad hoc mess of hand-outs to politically connected sectors — from Big Pharma to the defense industrial complex.
Why has planning failed to take off, when everybody from the Netherlands to China does it?
As with much in the US, it comes down to race.
Here’s John Quincy Adams on why the right thing blocked the left thing.
Similar stories can be told for Roosevelt, Nixon, and other eras.
This brings an intersectional US lens to what is often a conversation about other countries’ economic strategy.
There’s a lot of history to learn, as @rodrikdani @MazzucatoM & my own advisor @HaJoonChang3 can tell you. (qz.com/1669346/marian…) The report contends that — by fixing the things the US has gotten wrong in the past (racism, sexism, bad judges, and neoliberal economics) — we can actually do industrial policy even better than authoritarian countries like China.
We lay out these five criteria.
We give a few examples of what a forward looking industrial policy would look like. Think child care centers!
Needless to say, there’s lots more work to be done. And folks like @JWMason1@MarkVinPaul @SusanRHolmberg @jennifermharris @geoffreygertz @JooBillyare doing it.
For recent scholarship, check out @straightedge on @_alice_evans’ great podcast: (soundcloud.com/user-845572280…)
And… because you’ve been so good, you get a special bonus report: “The Green New Deal: A Ten-Year Window to Reshape International Economic Law.”
With the planet burning, that felt like the correct first follow-on product.
To further support the need for strong industrial policy, @toddntucker has also released a working paper, “The Green New Deal: A Ten-Year Window to Reshape International Economic Law.” http://bit.ly/2Zj4khe
