Red-State Successful Industrial Policy as Oxymoron
Red-State Successful Industrial Policy as Oxymoron
& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-02-07 Mo
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First: Red-State Successful Industrial Policy as Oxymoron
I can feel Debby Wu here trying to restrain herself:
Debby Wu: Chipmakers Are Outspending Governments: ‘Florida unveiled a $9.7 million program to boost state infrastructure and train future semiconductor engineers… off by a few orders of magnitude…. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. is set to spend over $40 billion on capex this year alone. Intel… more than $25 billion in 2022…. Samsung… is on a multiyear spending spree totaling more than $100 billion…. Japan is offering $6.8 billion in incentives to lure global chipmakers to the country and India is allocating $10 billion over six years for the development of a local semiconductor industry. The U.S. may… come up with a more bountiful $52 billion… but the Biden administration is still struggling to get that approved…. 70% of TSMC’s massive spending in 2022 is devoted to cutting-edge fabrication and capacity, meaning the majority of the budget will be used to improve facilities at home in Taiwan, where the company still makes the most advanced chips…
Not just not in the game. Not having a clue as to where the game even might be played.
It is not as though Republican politicians do not have people willing to work for them who could point them to where the game is. Consider Columbia’s Glenn Hubbard <https://www.amazon.com/Wall-Bridge-Fear-Opportunity-Disruptions/dp/0300259085/>:
Since September 1977… technological change and globalization have magnified the market value of my skills and… [other] professionals. Meanwhile, the closure of Youngstown’s integrated steel mills did not lead to moon-shot efforts toward the preparation and reconnection of many workers and communities…. Imagine if bold support for community colleges and training would match the preparation and reconnection of the G.I. Bill as America was encouraging global integration… bridge ideas… economic participation…. that generates an ever-increasing wealth of the nation.
Imagine mass flourishing.
Now it is true that when Glenn writes “we economists have let the public debate drift to the opposite extremes of building walls and a laissez-faire optimism about change and markets making everything OK”, my immediate reaction is that of Tonto to the Lone Ranger in the old joke: “what is this ‘we’, kemosabe?” But that I regard Glenn and company as late to the party does not mean that they are not capable of bringing plenty of refreshments with them.
However, what does he have to offer other than “bold support for community colleges and training”? That, plus tax cuts for the rich. Oh, and the political forces Glenn and company have allied themselves with always favor a cutting-back of broad-based social insurance because such egalitarian policies mean that somebody who their core voters regard as unequal to them might receive an equal amount of money.
There are huge, huge problems in running a successful economic developmental state in the modern world. The United States managed, somewhat, back when we were under the gun of sputnik and conservatives put maintaining social order and privilege behind gaining the economic and military strength to combat what they viewed as an existential threat. The countries of East Asia have managed—although I have questions about whether China's interior is managing. The club of post-World War II Marshall-Plan aid recipients, under the gun of Paul Hoffman's urging them to adopt policies that made his heavy lift of congressional approval for the next year's Marshall Plan funds possible, managed. But that is pretty much it in the modern world.
This I do not have a lot of confidence that my faction in American politics could do the job, even if its elbow were not being joggled constantly. Is there any reason to think that those to my right are not in much worse shape? I think the answer is “no”. And that is why they kept doubling-down on right-neoliberalism, even though neither Reagan nor Bushes had any effective policies to boost growth. Up until 2007, perhaps, they could argue that if their neoliberal bet had not paid off, at least it had not crapped out: Hyperglobalization and neoliberalism looked to have been superior to too much state-led development led by an anti-developmental state. And the high income and wealth inequality of the Second Gilded Age could be sold as a feature rather than a bug that would pay off eventually. But now it is clear, to Glenn at least, that something different is needed.
On the other hand, it can be done. I still think that Botswana is remarkable, and a sign that there should be considerable hope everywhere: Botswana, with an annual real income per capita estimated at $900 in 1960 and $14,000 in 2010, and the highest Human Development Index in sub-Saharan Africa, despite being landlocked, despite being severely affected by HIV/ AIDS, and being in a very bad regional neighborhood growth-wise. Consider that neighbor Zambia’s income per capita went from $2,800 in 1960 to $3,500 in 2010, from three times Botswana’s to one-fourth of Botswana’s.
In Botswana, an independent and uncorrupt judicial system, a lack of tariffs on machinery imports (to encourage technology transfer), a banking system that encouraged savings, and a policy of plowing back government revenues into infrastructure investment all helped. So did the luck and the skill of the Tswana chiefs in the late 1800s in managing to guide the British Empire into ruling with a very light hand, which made post-independence state-building very easy. And the fact that Botswana’s population was about 80 percent Tswana, as was the leader of the independence movement and the first president of independent Botswana (1966–1980), Seretse Khama, kgosi (“king” or “chief”) of the Ngwato, one of the eight principal Tswana chieftaincies.
Not to mention that Botswana negotiated a 50 percent ownership interest in the country’s De Beers mining subsidiary, plus a 15 percent ownership stake in the overall De Beers corporation.
Nevertheless, any country, anywhere, anywhen, could have done it, if Botswana managed to do it.
One Audio:
Sonia Purnell & al.: OH GOD, WHAT NOW? Formerly Remainiacs: ’As Sue Gray’s report_ comes out, how tenable is the PM’s position? And how does Russian money influence our politics? Boris Johnson biographer Sonia Purnell joins…
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Very Briefly Noted:
Melody Schreiber: Vastly Unequal Us Has World’s Highest Covid Death Toll: ‘It’s no coincidence. As the US nears 900,000 Covid deaths, much of the blame has fallen on individuals despite vast income inequality and vaccine accessibility issues… <https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/06/us-covid-death-rate-vaccines>
Matthew Yglesias: Biden’s Diversity Efforts Work Best When Quiet: ’A Black woman will join the Federal Reserve board before one sits on the Supreme Court… <https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-06/biden-s-diversity-efforts-work-best-when-quiet?cmpid%3D=socialflow-twitter-economics>
Benjamin Y. Fong & Dustin Guastella: The Siren Song of “Pro-Worker” Conservatism: ‘Some “anti-elitists” on the Right say they want the GOP to be the party of the working class. But what they’re really offering is a PR campaign that won’t fundamentally change the lives of workers… <https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/pro-worker-conservatism-right-wing-labor>
James Baldwin: ’It took me many years of vomiting up all the filth I’d been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here…
Jonathan Ichikawa: ’Maybe this is a hot take? Self-identified liberals who bemoan the lack of “reasonable conservatives”: the world will make a lot more sense when you stop trying to rehabilitate fascism and come to terms with the fact that it’s you. You are the reasonable conservatives…
Donald J. Trump: ’Just saw Mike Pence’s statement on the fact that he had no right to do anything with respect to the Electoral Vote Count, other than being an automatic conveyor belt for the Old Crow Mitch McConnell to get Biden elected President as quickly… <
Paragraphs:
Mr. Justice McREYNOLDS (1937): NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Dissent: ‘delivered the following dissenting opinion…. Considering… the departure from what… has been consistently ruled here… the obligation to present our views becomes plain…. Every consideration brought forward to uphold the act before us was applicable to support the acts held unconstitutional in causes decided within two years. And the lower courts rightly deemed them controlling…
Park MacDougald: The Battle on the New Right for the Soul of Trump’s America: ‘The new millennial right is as much a sensibility as a coherent intellectual movement…. The best way to think of them may be as something akin to a less heavily tattooed, right-wing version of the millennial New York socialists… young people connected by overlapping social and professional ties and frustrated with the politics of their elders…. One frequently cited influence is the historian Christopher Lasch… [who] argued that the “meritocracy” that had emerged from the social convulsions of the 1960s was a sham, producing an insular, culturally radical elite alienated from and contemptuous of the supposedly bigoted and backward country that it governed. This critique echoed neoconservative attacks on the liberal “new class” of academics and bureaucrats, but Lasch, ever the old Marxist, sought to tie the cultural obsessions of this elite to an increasingly globalized capitalism that had made it possible for them to break the economic, social, and cultural power of the middle and working classes…
LINK: <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-new-millennial-american-right>
Eric Topel: How to Misinterpret Clinical Outcome Data in Populations by Age Subgroups: ‘A headline in the New York Times was “Younger People Benefit Less From Boosters Than Older”. Of course they do, as risk of nearly any intervention in medicine along with its absolute benefit are less with younger age. But to imply that boosters don’t help younger people is a flawed interpretation…. Data… for vaccinations and boosters… indicates a highly consistent risk reduction… 96.5% efficacy for age 16 to 55 and 93.1% for age 55+…
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The initial handshaking on zoom has not gotten better over the past two years:
Speaker #1: Yes
Speaker #2: Hello
Speaker #1: Can you hear me?
Speaker #2: I cannot hear you for some reason. Do I have any sound turned off?
Speaker #1: No, I don't.
Speaker #2: Are you muted?
Speaker #1: No.
Speaker #2: Oh, now I can hear you. Am I muted? No, I am not muted. However you're not a dog.
Speaker #2: That is awesome. Can you see how that dog appears?
Speaker #1: Yes! It's a strange mysterious Ghost Dog!
Speaker #2: I love it. I love the Ghost Dog. Hold on, let me… no, I don't need to make myself more visible, I don't need to turn on front lighting, because we're not recording video. So who cares? Do you mind if I if I look like I'm in a cave? That's fine. After all, you are in a cave, aren't you? I mean, yes. And manmade sort of rectilinear cave.
Speaker #1: Is this working?
Speaker #1: Are we recording this afternoon? I just got a email asking this. But we are recording, like, right now.
Speaker #2: Yes.
Speaker #1: This is recording time. Good. Well…
That photo of the condo building looks a lot like some of the CGI of Sokovia in Age of Ultron.
Why yes, I did re-watch that today. I'm not sure the end result for FL will be much better, but it will take longer.
It seems to me that the reason Red-State Successful Industrial Policy amounts to an oxymoron is the different Dynamics of liberal and right-wing governance. Right wing governing parties tend to endorse crony capitalist strategies. I.e A business friendly policy is one where our friends receive favorable treatment. Most liberals accept that a level playing field approach to economic policy provides a competitive market outcome. Consider the southern conservative politicians who insist on spending billions for NASA's Space Launch System when the private sector has already provided a more cost effective alternative.