Earlier this week, I dug into the role of the toaster for American Compass. I warned against the temptation of the “Athena fallacy”:
Critics of a “made in the USA” manufacturing agenda have alleged that it could result in higher prices for the American consumer, but the continued atrophying of America’s manufacturing infrastructure has long-term costs. In contrast to the “potato chips are the same as computer chips” consensus of 1989, policymakers today are running into the reality that the nuts and bolts of manufacturing matter.
At times, the way policymakers and others talk about manufacturing falls into what we might term the “Athena fallacy,” after the Greek goddess who jumped fully formed out of the head of Zeus: all that matters are the ideas, and manufacturing is simply reproducing those ideas. A core assumption of the Athena fallacy is that the cognitive part of the economy is divorced from the manual part. In reality, though, inventing and making go hand in hand.
You can read the rest here.
Evidence of a bipartisan shift toward new thinking in economics? See this from California Congressman Ro Khanna supporting the project of “industrial policy.” Another left-realignment figure, Connecticut senator Chris Murphy is profiled by James Pogue in the New York Times. It’s a fascinating write-up, and it locates some important currents in contemporary political debates. There’s one thing I might express some caution about:
It would be very hard, these days, to put together a room of well-informed academics or policy types under the age of 70 who don’t think that America faces a choice between huge systemic reform and a full-blown crisis.
I think many seriously following politics today do doubt the sustainability of the elite consensus circa 2001. But whether that involves “huge systemic reform” is up for debate. A shift toward a paradigm of resilience—with attention to industrial infrastructure and middle-class uplift—isn’t necessarily a dramatic change from the bigger contours of American policymaking. In fact, one of the things that made the neoliberal period so rigid was a very narrow sense of what “American policymaking” meant. Critics of neoliberalism shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that the “normal” is as limited as neoliberals said it was.
For City Journal, I had a preview of as well as an after-action report on this week’s DNC. Watching the DNC, you know what I was reminded of?
Yes, The Music Man.
When the former players of his championship-winning high-school football team came out in their jerseys to introduce Walz, I almost expected to hear “Seventy-Six Trombones” play. Instead of the pool table, the great threat to America was Donald Trump: we’re not going back, with a capital “B” and that rhymes with “T” and that stands for “Trump.” Harris has avoided on-the-record interactions with the media, and even her policies get adjudicated mostly through spokesmen. As Nevada senator and Harris ally Catherine Cortez Masto told RealClearPolitics, “we need to continue to ensure that we are flexible when it comes to solving the problems of this country.” The Harris campaign has so far angled to keep her policy program in the same place as Harold Hill’s music lessons: the imagination.
You can read the rest here.
A good weekend read: Tanner Greer’s “Silicon Valley canon.”
Thanks for reading, everyone!