the claim was that the US has lost its industry compared to China. which is ridiculous when looking at the numbers, but understandable if someone is misinformed (because they only know about the rust belt, let's say)
what I'm trying to point out is that having a first-class industrial base, with enough experts, well running supply-chains, and so on, is different from eclipsing China in straight to trash gadget output.
that said, of course, as the article and the comment section clearly shows there are a lot of high profile cases where the trope of bean counters ran the business into the ground has been very unfortunately true.
productivity of the whole economy is fine, but aggregates hide a gigantic mountain of first- and second-order effects that hurt millions directly and indirectly. (as you mention wealth, income, health and other kinds of inequalities are mostly reinforced by a lot of powerful systems. and, just to emphasize this, US social mobility is on par with Spain's, despite the latter known for generous welfare programs, but almost all developed countries have serious tensions between rural-urban groups, generational wealth transfer due to real estate prices spiraling out of control, and so on.)
there are other countries besides China, and there are other sectors besides pew-pew and let's say nuclear power plants, or train safety systems.
the obvious (well, of course not to everyone) problem is that there's no serious effort for economic integration with US allies. the US still has a lot of protectionism dressed up as national security. from the Jones Act shenanigans (oh think of the shipbuilders, oh only one left basically in a zombie state), and the baby formula oopsie (oh think of the horror of Canadian baby formula or European, but no Abbott knows best), and there's some pork for the textile industry too, and so on.
> what I'm trying to point out is that having a first-class industrial base, with enough experts, well running supply-chains, and so on, is different from eclipsing China in straight to trash gadget output.
Absolutely true! But we're nowhere near able to do the latter, so what's the point in caring?
> social mobility
Unrelated, but this is a misnomer. The correct term would be "economic mobility". Social concerns are necessarily orthogonal (i.e. intersectional) to economic ones. I understand that social mobility is the common term but it's extremely disingenuous when it only intersects with social interests through economic interests.
Economic mobility is also strictly less interesting than wealth disparity—being able to move up the social ladder doesn't matter much if there's still self-aggrandizing ghouls controlling most of the economy and the market fails to represent the public.
what are you talking about? the public buys shit from China and uses Amazon, and votes for idiots who then dismantle the rest of the system around them. sure, we can console ourselves that it's not the majority, but hundreds of millions of them are part of the problem.
what I'm trying to point out is that having a first-class industrial base, with enough experts, well running supply-chains, and so on, is different from eclipsing China in straight to trash gadget output.
that said, of course, as the article and the comment section clearly shows there are a lot of high profile cases where the trope of bean counters ran the business into the ground has been very unfortunately true.
productivity of the whole economy is fine, but aggregates hide a gigantic mountain of first- and second-order effects that hurt millions directly and indirectly. (as you mention wealth, income, health and other kinds of inequalities are mostly reinforced by a lot of powerful systems. and, just to emphasize this, US social mobility is on par with Spain's, despite the latter known for generous welfare programs, but almost all developed countries have serious tensions between rural-urban groups, generational wealth transfer due to real estate prices spiraling out of control, and so on.)
there are other countries besides China, and there are other sectors besides pew-pew and let's say nuclear power plants, or train safety systems.
the obvious (well, of course not to everyone) problem is that there's no serious effort for economic integration with US allies. the US still has a lot of protectionism dressed up as national security. from the Jones Act shenanigans (oh think of the shipbuilders, oh only one left basically in a zombie state), and the baby formula oopsie (oh think of the horror of Canadian baby formula or European, but no Abbott knows best), and there's some pork for the textile industry too, and so on.