Resurfaced: August 15 2025, 2023
Charles Finch on Capitalism | Putnam, Reeves on Boy Crisis | Rodrik, Juhász, Lane on Industrial Policy
In some sense capitalism is already behind us. We live here in its fevered midst, to be sure, but a recognition is emerging, especially among younger generations: It isn’t sustainable. The devastation of the natural world; the mindless consumerism; above all, the human misery that corporations trawl the world to extract, like ore, from souls as divine as yours or mine. All of it, increasingly, in service to the pathological greed of a few thousand mentally ill men. It cannot last. What comes next may be better, or it may be worse. But it won’t be this.
| Charles Finch, Her Job Was Real. So Why Did Her Work Feel So Fake?
2025-08-15
Robert D. Putnam, Richard V. Reeves, Boy Crisis of 2025, Meet the ‘Boy Problem’ of the 1900s
Many boys and men are struggling today, too, in an America once again disrupted by technological change, immigration and growing inequality. Since 2010, suicide rates among young men have risen by a third — they are now higher than they are among middle-aged men. The share of college degrees going to men has fallen to 41 percent, lower than the women’s share in 1970. One in 10 men aged 20 to 24 is effectively doing nothing — neither enrolled in school nor working. That’s twice the rate in 1990. This crisis demands a response equivalent to what the Progressive era delivered, not just in public policy but equally important, from our civic institutions.
We continue to fail our young men.
2023-08-15
Economists Reconsider Industrial Policy | Dani Rodrik, Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane
Better economic techniques are leading to a broad reappraisal of industrial policy, like Bidenomics [emphasis mine]:
As policymakers around the world embrace industrial policy in pursuit of a wide variety of objectives – supply-chain resilience, green technologies, geopolitical advantage, good jobs – the debate over its effectiveness is reaching fever pitch. Typically, this debate is portrayed as one where sound economics is squarely on the skeptics’ side. “There is a strong case against industrial policy in economics,” intoned one recent commentary, and embracing it “just wastes money and distorts the economy.” This is an increasingly outmoded view.
While it is generally true that mainstream economists have responded to industrial policy with knee-jerk hostility since at least the 1970s, things have been changing fast, owing to new academic research that is less driven by ideological hostility to government intervention and better grounded in rigorous empirical methods.
In the past, economists too often focused on simple indicators such as import tariffs, capturing only limited dimensions of industrial policy and conflating its objectives with others (such as raising government revenue or playing special-interest politics).
For starters, industrial policy has been ubiquitous, and its prevalence predates the recent rise in its use and prominence in public discussions.
And the prevalence of industrial policies tends to increase with income: advanced economies use it more often and intensively than developing countries do.
The results of [modern statistical research] are much more favorable to industrial policy, tending to find that such policies – or historical accidents that mimic their effects – have often led to large, seemingly beneficial long-term effects in the structure of economic activity.
Newer studies also shed light on the long-standing controversy over the contribution of industrial policy to East Asia’s economic miracle. [...] The early economic literature on East Asia’s rise had argued that industrial policies were at best ineffective. Newer analyses paying closer attention to the structure of upstream and downstream linkages in these economies reach considerably more sanguine conclusions. [...] Critics of East Asian policies thought governments could never pick the right sectors because they lacked information on where market failures were more prominent.
Princeton economist Ernest Liu has recently provided a useful guide for policymakers confronting an economy where market imperfections occur across multiple, linked sectors. In such settings, subsidizing upstream sectors generally minimizes policy mistakes. Liu shows that the actual policies used in China and during South Korea’s HCI were in line with this guidance.
Some commentators have recently criticized US President Joe Biden’s industrial policy because it “lacks a rigorous economic foundation.” The reality is that plenty of good economic research already exists on industrial policy.
I wonder if the economists stuck in the past on industrial policy are also the ones who wanted Powell’s Fed to raise interest rates — post-COVID — because they believed high unemployment was necessary to avoid a recession?