Industrial policy is, once again, back on the political agenda. Not long ago considered “a policy that should not be named,” or a “phrase that one did not utter in polite company,” industrial policy is currently being heralded as the preferred economic policy of both advanced and developing nations. Indeed, since the great financial crisis of 2008, there is a growing worldwide consensus that society’s most formidable challenges—from adverse climate change to widening economic inequal­ity—cannot be addressed by market forces alone. This trend has only accelerated since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the United States, the Senate recently approved a $250 billion industrial policy bill, the “U.S. Innovation and Competition Act…

The Covid-19 pandemic brought tragedy and disruption to America. But it has also provided another stark warning concern­ing the country’s disastrous overreliance on overseas production. It has demon­strated that without a strong, self-reliant industrial base, this country’s ability to forge a healthy, prosperous future—and even its ability to defend itself against foreign enemies—will be severely compromised. The fact that the world’s largest, and theoretically most advanced, economy could not provide…

On what surely was a brisk fall day in November 2017, two professors from the Columbia Business School crossed the his­toric Mill Creek Park Bridge in Youngstown, Ohio, and “remarked about what a useful and attractive connector it was for the city.” They had other bridges on their mind as they walked, though: “economic bridges for Youngstown and similar communities,” the professors mused, might “carry them to renewed opportunity…

The name “cobalt” comes from the German word kobold, which translates as “goblin” or “evil spirit.” When sixteenth-century miners in Saxony discovered the metal, they thought they had stumbled upon silver, yet it was later revealed that the ores were poor in metals that were known at the time. Upon smelting, the ore (where cobalt…

World leaders recently gathered in Glasgow for “COP26,” the latest UN climate change conference. At the top of the agenda was the need for carbon mitigation actions to achieve the Paris Accord’s goals and to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century. In anticipation of the confer­ence, the Euro­pean Commission released the “European Green Deal,” a package…

Discovering truths hidden in plain sight may be the single greatest challenge in this era of information oversupply, but here’s a try: America’s environment is the cleanest it has ever been in our lifetime—and perhaps several lifetimes. This statement should come as no surprise, given our country’s…

In a Pew Research Center poll taken in the spring of 2020, 65 percent of Americans said the federal government was doing “too little to reduce effects of climate change.” A few months later, Pew conducted a survey of registered voters on the top issues for the 2020 presidential election. The voters placed climate change a distant eleventh…

The coronavirus pandemic has changed people’s expectations of what government can and should do. Debate around the limits of mar­kets has accelerated, creating more space for conservatives and progressives alike to put forward new ideas for reform. Many sense that the rapid expansion of federal power and spending…

Republicans keen to tout the supposed superiority of their preferred economic model often cite booming Sunbelt states like Texas or Tennessee as evidence that it works. They don’t talk as much about less successful red states like Kansas or West Virginia. A look at solid red Indiana and its poor performance shows the limits of…

Whatever one thinks of today’s culture wars, it is hard to deny that the various barbarians currently rattling the gates were, in some sense, created by the failure of the prior generation to live up to its promises. Old center-left bromides about growing the economy by endlessly expanding higher education now ring hollow. Retreads of…

In our political culture, there is no issue quite like wokeness. The conversation it provokes tends to be about everything and nothing at the same time. It is central to our politics because Republican resistance to it is perhaps the single greatest force binding the American Right together. And while the mass messaging of Democratic politicians tends to focus…

In January 2021, shortly after Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration, the Central Intelligence Agency announced a “digital facelift.” The agency’s goal was to attract millennial and Gen Z applicants who might be skeptical of the organization’s mission and to “increase racial, cultur­al, disability, sexual orientation, and gender diversity so that its work­force is ‘reflective of America…

There is a strange feedback loop between our institutions and the internet: the internet spreads mental illness like a plague and our institutions codify the latest psychosis. In pop culture, this dynamic created critical barista theory, in which the language of high criticism is used to articulate pop culture preferences. Critical barista theory…