American cities are more productive than ever. They facilitate world-changing innovation in information technology, life sciences, and finance, generating enormous wealth. Despite this, they are plagued by serious problems. Crime, low school quality, poor governance, and high housing costs combine to create a quality of life that is significantly lower than pre-tax incomes and overall economic activity would sug­gest. While the causes of these problems are many and varied, they are to a significant degree downstream of one recurring pattern: the bimodal distribution of real estate ownership. Most adults fall into one of two categories: homeowner or renter…

The Weirton Steel mill produced half of the world’s steel in 1950 and nearly 20 percent by 1970. By the later 1970s, imports of steel from foreign nations were flooding U.S. markets and boxing out Weirton’s position. This phenomenon didn’t just impact Weirton but also other domestic manufacturers. Although calls grew nationally from steelworkers and their unions for antidumping, counter­vailing duties, and escape clause petitions, Weirton and the industry continued to suffer. In 1982, Weirton’s parent company National Steel announced its plans to shut down the steel mill. As an alternative to paying for shutdown costs and pension liabilities, the company offered employees the opportunity to buy the company through an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). Employees decided to take pay cuts and bought the mill…

Gelsinger was unable to fully execute a successful response to this economic shift during his truncated tenure as Intel CEO, however, and to push his proposed new corporate “Intel IDM 2.0” business model. He resigned in 2024 under pressure from the company’s board. Whether Gelsinger’s performance or the current Intel board’s impatience and shortsightedness bear ultimate responsibility for this implementation failure is unclear. Intel’s current problems were decades in the making. But this past history has now created an acute American defense industrial crisis with global national security ramifications…

America’s bungled response to the Covid-19 pandemic’s medical manufacturing demands illustrates the limitations of both the American industrial base and state capacity. Despite policies aimed at reshoring medical supply manufacturing, multiple projects’ funding expired before new facilities could be finished, limited federal resources were spread too thin, and the halting pace of policymaking failed to entice investors. An honest accounting of these policies’ failures and shortcomings is necessary to inform any serious response…

How can the United States quickly build secure, domestic supply chains for critical resources? It’s a question on minds in Washington, especially in the shadow of China’s tightening restrictions on the export of critical minerals, battery technology, and drone inputs to the United States. In early December 2024, Beijing announced a ban on the sale of gallium, germanium, and antimony to the United States—minerals critical for semiconductors, fiber optic cables, and solar cells. Fortunately, Washington has an industrial policy playbook for crash‑building essential supply chains at home and with allies, even if it’s little remembered. It was written in World War II, and the critical resource in question was rubber…

The long-standing neglect of American technological strength stems from the fact that neither technological innovation nor industrial capacity have preoccupied America’s political culture for some time. This presents a significant hurdle as this coalition seeks to affect enduring changes in policy. Fortunately, history offers instructive models for overcoming such obstacles. The challenge before America’s techno-industrialists today resembles that confronted by generations of Chinese reformers as they reckoned with how far their country had fallen behind the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries…

With hindsight, one might consider Brexit, consummated after long haggling in 2020, the last, and lost, opportunity for the European Union to mend its ways and become a viable political entity, if not community. The departure of the United Kingdom did not register as a warning that the Union had become too internally diverse to hold together, having rapidly expanded both territorially and functionally. To the contrary, Germany under Merkel and France under Macron saw an opportunity, or pretended to see one, to push the old integration project—the “ever closer union of the peoples of Europe”—forward, now that “Euroskeptic” Britain, one of the Union’s Big Three, had left. But then, they arguably had little choice as the EU’s de facto constitution (two international treaties each hundreds of pages long) is practically unchangeable as any amendment has to be agreed by all member states, which some can do only after a referendum. One may assume that this rigidity was exactly what was desired when the treaties in their present form were signed in Maastricht in 1992 and Amsterdam in 1997, to cast in stone the logic of neoliberal political economy that was at the time considered the ultimate stage of economic wisdom…

Against the backdrop of Sino-American tensions, the Philippines is also confronting a brewing civil war between the country’s two most powerful political dynasties. Since the return of the Marcoses to the Malacañang Palace in May 2022, they have wasted no time in rehabilitating their political image both at home and abroad. But Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s attempt at projecting a more “reformist” image—and his decision to reverse some of the most authoritarian policies of his immediate predecessor, Rodrigo Duterte—have set him on a collision course with the Dutertes…

During the Cold War, opposition leaders like Václav Havel were able to point to the West as a guiding star. Navalny clearly hoped to do the same. But over thirty years after that conflict came to a close, Americans and Russians alike no longer wish to be forced to walk down an imaginary arc of history. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russians already learned that such an arc goes on forever, until it is no more. It is a lesson they are unlikely to forget anytime soon…

Since the 1960s, the Democratic Party has transformed. From a party rooted since the New Deal era in both “developmental liberalism” and a version of social democratic class politics, it has grown into a broad but precarious canopy beneath which shelters a fractious mix of political interests and formations, from finance-friendly fiscal policy to redistributionism, and a fragile barbell-shaped electoral coalition. The 2024 U.S. elections underscored the difficulty that American liberalism faces in fashioning a durable political majority from these constituent parts…

For years, it seemed, digital technology was the ultimate one-way ratchet. There was no going back—only onward and upward (for the optimist), or onward and downward (for the doomer). Not only was digital technology here to stay (where else could it be?), but it seemed destined to inexorably colonize every corner of our lives and our attention, from cradle to grave. The average age of first smartphone fell steadily (it now stands at ten). Smartphones and smartwatches were soon augmented with smart refrigerators and smart homes. If future historians identify an inflection point in the linear growth of digitization, however, they are likely to find it in the year 2023…

While America is battling exhaustion and political polarization at home, it is now facing something it’s never faced abroad: it is locked into a security competition against multiple opponents who, when taken together, are in fact vastly superior to America in terms of industrial capacity. This on its own would be an incredibly tough row to hoe, even at the best of times. The times, however, are not particularly good: the U.S. military currently finds itself in a state of acute crisis, beset by a number of intractable problems that neither the political nor military leadership have been able to solve…

Social forms decay. This truism often elicits sweeping historical narratives that resurrect ancient names and obscure metaphysical disputes, while ignoring the most relevant social units—the organizations we interact with on a regular basis. Many of today’s most powerful organizations, from nonprofits to corporations, have been insulated from the immediate repercussions of decay by monetary policy, or the financialization of the economy. This results in the proliferation of unproductive organizations that look healthy from the outside. The first Boeing 737 MAX crash happened in October 2018, and no one mentioned it on the company’s Q4 earnings call…