A New Industrialist roundup

American thinkers are realizing we need to build, build, build. What comes next?

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.

I had the idea after reading the book Concrete Economics: The Hamilton Approach to Economic Growth and Policy, by Brad DeLong and Stephen S. Cohen. In that book, DeLong and Cohen argue that economic policy works best when the government gives the people a concrete vision of what they’ll be getting. If we simply throw up our hands and leave everything to the market, they argue, we’ll simply have an economy based on finance. But they stop short of envisioning exactly what to promise the American people.

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 (like I did with my Techno-Optimism Roundup last year). But first, I want to tell my very condensed version of how we got to this point.

 
How we got to New Industrialism
The first thing that motivated New Industrialism was the China Shock. Unlike the scares about Japanese and European competition in the 70s and 80s — which proved mostly salutary for the U.S. economy — the shock from China joining the world trading system in the early 2000s was real, and American manufacturing did get hollowed out to some degree. People who tell you that the U.S. manufactures as much as it ever did before have talking points that are over a decade out of date; industrial production in manufacturing has never exceeded its peak in 2007, and is barely higher than in 2000:

 
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Πηγή: noahpinion.substack.com