“Made in America” is on (government) life support, and the prognosis isn’t good

Intel and Boeing, two of the pillars of American industry.

They are weathered, tired, and crumbling, and it doesn’t seem likely that they can hold up the American economy the way they have over the past generation, nor keep the country on the frontier of innovation any longer in their critical industries.

Now, even the absolute finest pillars of American exceptionalism in industry are under deep threat.

For the United States, the first step in ameliorating these slow-motion train wrecks has been the classic policy crisis tool of the bailout.

It’s not that industrial policy fails, it’s that American industrial policy seems flagrantly incompetent.

Korea has made cultural productions like K-pop and K-drama a top government priority, now a massive growing global industry.

In each of these successful cases, governments spurred the creation of new industries through incentives and policy changes, while ensuring that these industries built up differentiated intellectual property that would pay back those incentives in spades.

Industries could be fragmented, government policy could be out-of-whack, schools and universities could be horrifically inefficient in training, but none of that mattered since few other countries could compete across such a breadth of industry.

Taiwan is not great at semiconductors because of a random constellation of factors, it’s great because it pushed its entire economy, education system, and government to prioritize its excellence on top of changes like the opening of the global economy and the rise of China.