Technological Competition amid Stagnation
A New Era for the Chinese Semiconductor Industry: Beijing Responds to Export Controls
China’s domestic semiconductor industry landscape has changed considerably. The Biden administration has continued to impose export control restrictions on Chinese firms, and the October 7, 2022, package of controls targeted not only advanced semiconductors (such as GPUs used for running artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads) but also expanded significantly on controls over semiconductor manufacturing equipment (SME). One goal of the U.S. controls is to prevent Chinese firms from moving into nonplanar technology processes, such as FinFET and eventually Gate All Around (GAA). The new restrictions included novel end-use controls and controls on U.S. persons, posing major new challenges…
Lessons from the Corporate Labs: Technological Competition in a Changing Business Environment
The economic success of the United States in creating the digital world owes a great deal to two key factors. The first is the ability to innovate great technologies, and the second is the ability to turn these innovations into major industrial products. This creative success was not the result of a lack of international…
How Economic Theory Went Wrong
Well-managed economies grow at a decent pace while keeping unemployment and inflation at low and stable levels. By these criteria, all major developed countries have been run incompetently for the past two decades. They have experienced stagnation of output and incomes, the worst recessions since the Great Depression, and, more recently, a surge in inflation.…
The Direction of the Left
Omelets with Eggshells: On the Failure of the Millennial Left
In the final analysis, the Left became the last defender of neoliberalism, not its undertaker. For all its denunciations, was it incapable of imagining anything else? Too many of its practices reflected back some of the worst features of the current order: short-termism; a bias against political programs, mass organization and institution-building; and reliance on media and charismatic leaders. This is why the 2010s are a historic missed opportunity: when amid signs of mass revolt for the first time in decades, the ostensible forces of utopianism sought to change the content of politics without challenging the neoliberal shell that contained it—to make an omelet without breaking any eggs…
The Other Great Replacement: Where Have All the Democrats Gone?
Much is said these days about manufacturing, but what about meatpacking? Chicago, the big-shouldered city of Carl Sandburg’s America—before toolmaker or player with railroads—was hog butcher for the world. As John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira note in last year’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, working in meatpacking paid 25 percent more than a mean…
The Causes of the Latest Border Crisis, and How to Fix It
How did illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border become the mess that it is? U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) encounters with migrants averaged under 600,000 in fiscal years 2010–20, but tripled in fiscal 2021, the year Biden took office, to a record of nearly 1.9 million, and reached 3.2 million in fiscal 2023. What…
The Art of the Possible
Overthrowing the Dictatorship of No Alternatives
The world remains restless under the yoke of a dictatorship of no alternatives. The last great moment of institutional and ideological refoundation in the rich North Atlantic countries was the institutionally conservative social democracy presaged before the Second World War and fully developed in those countries after the war. Its counterpart in the United States was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. This refoundation offered to regulate the economy more intensively, to attenuate inequalities through progressive taxation and redistributive social spending, and to manage the economy countercyclically by fiscal and monetary policy. In its most elaborate form, in Western Europe, it protected insiders against outsiders in the labor market (defending the stable…
Rediscovering the Readjusters: Remembering a Lost Multiracial, Working-Class Movement
Imagine a multiracial populist movement composed of middle- and working-class voters. Now imagine that they sweep into power on a platform of lower taxes, less government debt, and better schools, and once in office, they manage to accomplish this agenda. To many, it sounds like such a movement is too good to be true. The…
The Five Crises of the Fifth French Republic
Precisely at this moment when the world is converging toward de Gaulle’s ideas, France is abandoning them altogether. Instead of embracing industrial policy, France has liberalized its economy. Instead of doubling down on republican ideals, France has weakened its conception of citizenship. Instead of celebrating judicial restraint, France has empowered judges at the expense of voters…
Fragile Identities
Not So Black and White: Ethnicity versus Identity Politics in Newark
Last October, I made my way down to St. Lucy’s Church in Newark’s North Ward, as I do every year. I waited in a seemingly endless line of cars to cram into a makeshift parking lot, and I looked in my rearview mirror to see a diverse crowd of people under bright decorative lights intertwined with red and green garland, a sea of food trucks, and the steeple of a nearly century-old Romanesque church. After parking, I followed the voice of an amateur Sinatra impersonator doing a 1950s-standards rendition of Palestrina’s “Ave Maria,” eventually finding my way into the church, as I stepped over children running around with toys won…
How Feminism Ends
At least, the timing of the redefinition of “woman” is convenient. At the exact moment that we are implicitly evaluating the results of a century’s worth of upheaval on sexual roles, the key demographic in question has become almost impossible to describe. Still, I never found the “transgender question,” as Todd calls it, particularly interesting. It seemed like a red herring on the quest to understand women. But I came back to it, because there is something, certainly, going on with women…
More Christian than the Christians
Last year, a cascade of books came off conservative presses, each taking turns striking at the recent phenomenon of “wokeness.” These offerings include polemics and instructional manuals such as Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom, School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them,…
Online Exclusives
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Foreign Government Subsidies and FDA Regulatory Failures Are Causing Drug Shortages in the United States: Here’s How to Fix It
The United States is suffering from the worst drug shortage crisis in recent history. Whether it is basic generic drugs, antibiotics, or chemotherapy drugs, patients, doctors, and hospitals are facing shortages that are claiming American lives and straining our nation’s health care system. According to…
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The China Challenge: A Conversation with Reps. Jake Auchincloss and Ro Khanna
Please join us in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 8 for a conversation with Representatives Jake Auchincloss and Ro Khanna. The China Challenge: The Future of U.S.-China Relations and Revitalizing American Industry…
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The Travails of Bidenomics
The recent media flurry over “Bidenomics” is the latest attempt to distill a complex but far from complete rupture with neoliberalism. Premised in part on lifting the wages and employment rate of historically low-income groups, Bidenomics is really about two things: strengthening the relationship between…
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The Ghosts of Mont Pelerin: Visiting the Birthplace of Neoliberalism
“Pelerin” means pilgrim in French. I made a pilgrimage—an ironic one—to Mont Pelerin in Switzerland. It was here in 1947 that F. A. Hayek organized the foundational meeting that would effectively launch neoliberalism as an intellectual and policy movement (the term was coined at a…
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Making—and Sustaining—the News: A Virtual Discussion
The question of how to fund newsgathering has made the news. With the advent of internet classifieds, the growth of massive search and social media platforms, and the wide availability of free news content, media organizations—particularly local and regional ones—have faced challenges in sustaining robust newsgathering…
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Making—and Sustaining—the News
The question of how to fund newsgathering has made the news. Since the advent of internet classifieds, the growth of massive search and social media platforms, and the wide availability of free news content, media organizations—particularly local and regional ones—have faced challenges in sustaining robust…
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Should We Save Newspapers from Google?
There are a lot of discussions about the media in American politics, but very few about advertising, which is the key pivot point around which the media organizes itself. In America, and throughout the world, the press is dying, starved of ad revenue. Since 2005,…
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Big Tech and the News: A Problem of Countervailing Power
On the morning of October 14, 2020, I caught a firsthand glimpse of what it’s like for a traditional media outlet to go up against the vast agglomeration of economic and digital power known as Big Tech—and to do so without the benefit of what…
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Small Media, Big Tech, and the “Partiality” Imperative
It has been about two years since Australia enacted its much-disputed News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) legislation. That new dispensation Down Under requires hegemonic Big Tech platforms to remunerate local Aussie media outlets, in straightforward enough fashion, for the right to post and disseminate an…
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Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code and the World It Created
If publishers bargaining for payments from platforms was going to save local journalism in Australia, we’d probably know it by now. After all, back in 2021 Australia passed the News Media Bargaining Code, presented as a way for publishers to claw back advertising revenue. In…
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