(2022-02-03) Smith A New Industrialist Roundup

Noah Smith: A New Industrialist roundup. Six years ago, I wrote a pair of Bloomberg columns predicting the rise of an intellectual movement that I called New Industrialism — though I was sure that people would name it something else. Basically, the idea was that America wasn’t investing enough (i.e., not building enough productive capital), and that we needed a new economic outlook that emphasized building more stuff. Now that movement is springing to life before my eyes, so I think it’s time to take stock of where we are.

Now those ideas are starting to emerge. The main purpose of this post is to bring together a list of the people I see arguing for some kind of New Industrialist program

But first, I want to tell my very condensed version of how we got to this point.

The first thing that motivated New Industrialism was the China Shock.

The China Shock caused many economists, and even more policymakers, to rethink the free trade consensus that had prevailed in previous decades.

The Great Recession obviously dealt another terrible blow to American manufacturing. That recession, and the financial crisis that sparked it, prompted a general realization that our economy had become too financialized.

The third big shock was Covid-19. In the early months of the pandemic, America struggled to manufacture enough tests, enough masks, and enough ventilators, while China seemed to do just fine.

And all this time, there has been another slow-moving crisis — the housing shortage. In fact, nationwide rents have only outpaced incomes by a little bit, but in big cities the crisis has become acute.

So these crises showed Americans what we couldn’t build enough of: Houses and manufacturing industries. There’s also infrastructure.

But if the New Industrialist movement is the child of crisis, it’s also the product of hope. The triumph of mRNA vaccine science, combined with the sudden cheapness of renewable energy, fueled a burst of techno-optimism; suddenly, lots of Americans are realizing how many scientific efforts seem to be coming to fruition at the same time, and are getting excited about the possibilities.

New Industrialist Roundup

Ezra Klein: “The Economic Mistake the Left Is Finally Confronting”. Ezra is one of America’s foremost liberal pundits. In a New York Times article last September, he laid out his vision of what he called “supply-side progressivism”

Derek Thompson: “A Simple Plan to Solve All of America’s Problems”. Derek Thompson, the man who first got me into op-ed writing, has spent the last few years trying to look beyond America’s age of division and unrest and imagine positive, productive things we could focus on. (2022-01-16) ThompsonASimplePlanToSolveAllOfAmericasProblems

Alec Stapp and Caleb Watney: “Progress Is a Policy Choice”. Stapp and Watney have recently launched a new think tank, the Institute for Progress. (progress)

Remarks by Secretary of the Treasury Janet L. Yellen at the 2022 'Virtual Davos Agenda' Hosted by the World Economic Forum. Janet Yellen is the Treasury Secretary, which means she’s basically in charge of crafting President Biden’s economic policy framework. And in her recent speech at the virtual Davos summit, she sounded an extremely New Industrialist note

Katherine Boyle: “Building American Dynamism”. To be blunt, New Industrialism cannot happen without buy-in from the private sector. So it’s encouraging to see Andreessen Horowitz, one of the country’s leading VC firms, talking explicitly about the need to build physical infrastructure.

Vitalik Buterin: “The bulldozer vs. vetocracy political axis” Vitalik, the founder of Ethereum, is another smart person who is starting to think about politics in terms of progress vs. stasis rather than in terms of left vs. right. His recent essay includes diagrams and examples.

Our task now is to refuse to let that era fizzle out — to refuse to allow it to fall prey to cynicism, social exhaustion, vetocratic obstructionism, or relentlessly destructive zero-sum ideological and partisan wars.