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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

In 2011, the economist Tyler Cowen published The Great Stagnation, a short treatise with a provocative hypothesis. Cowen challenged his audience to look beyond the gleam of the internet and personal compu­ting, arguing that these innovations masked a more troubling reality. Cowen contended that, since the 1970s, there has been a marked stagna­tion in critical…