NEW @ForeignAffairs from @FeliciaWongRI and me:

A Tale of Two Industrial Policies:

How America and Europe Can Turn Trade Tensions Into Climate Progress
foreignaffairs.com/united-states/… This year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland turned at times into a freeform airing of grievances by EU lawmakers over Biden's Inflation Reduction Act and the impact it could have on EU producers.
politico.com/news/2023/01/1…

Strong second.

I loved working with terrific editors @monkeycageblog, including @ejgraff @ErikVoeten @henryfarrell @vanessa_lide @ProfSaunders @segoddard and others, who helped make my academic and policy commentary legible to a wider audience.

11 hits of gratitude. Thread👇

https://twitter.com/kelly_zvobgo/status/1610424929207418880

When I had just defended my dissertation and was on the job market, @ErikVoeten encouraged me to try to develop some of my arguments around #ISDS for a policy audience. It ended up becoming a section of my book Judge Knot.
washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-c…

The dream of the 90s is alive in Postland.
washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/… You might have thought that an essay that started with this triumphant victory lap for Bidenomics would conclude that more of the same would be wise.

You would be wrong.

Frustration with American legalism, from 1894 AFL convention, in Fishkin and Forbath 2022 Corporate chartering as abdication of constitutional responsibility of federal government, provided for in commerce clause

"If Stanley Cohen once defined the social phenomenon of the “moral panic”, one is tempted to say that what the IRA has unleashed in Europe is a “policy panic”: an echo-chamber of zealous & intense responses to a perceived existential threat." - @adam_tooze
adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-18… And here's an oped length dive from @adam_tooze on the Transatlantic politics of the IRA: An arms race on industrial policy is the last thing Europe needs.
ft.com/content/c609f8…

Wow. The EU is not stopping at criticizing the electric vehicle tax credit. Instead they are taking aim at vast swaths of the climate provisions of the IRA. Underlines the importance of @MESandbu's entreaty in today's @FT. The EU needs to decide whether it wants the decarbonization agenda the US can actually deliver, or no decarbonization agenda at all.

Ensure a livable planet, or cling to neoliberalism?

https://twitter.com/toddntucker/status/1589610577743466501

A moribund WTO may soon be wrestling with The Biden Doctrine.

https://twitter.com/HenryJFoy/status/1589286073875976195

This is the idea that there should be Green Peace between allies until there's sufficient clean products on the market, which is a decade or two off.

https://twitter.com/toddntucker/status/1581667554312933377?t=8h2G8_yzdG1frp3PPkGK6Q&s=19

If Dems keep the Senate, it will be due to union workers' votes, and union leaders and a handful of candidates that did an above-average job owning the legislative wins of the last few years.

https://twitter.com/LaurenKGurley/status/1589311958440116224

And here's an excellent illustration from @LaurenKGurley about the interconnection between industrial policy for manufacturing and the service sector (education, care, etc). Voters want both.

ICYMI -Chip manufacturer Micron announced plans to build a $100 billion factory near Syracuse that would create nearly 50,000 jobs– the largest semiconductor manufacturing investment in U.S. history.
nytimes.com/2022/10/04/tec… This investment alone is projected to bring US market share of chip production from less than 2% to over 10% in the next decade.
whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/…

Progressive Industrial Policy: 2022 and Beyond.

Video from our @rooseveltinst forum is now live!

17 speakers, 6 sessions, hundreds of thinkers and doers gathered.

What did it all mean? Here are Five Takeaways from your truly.

rooseveltinstitute.org/2022/10/13/fiv… #IndustrialPolicy2022 Let's start with some scene setting. It’s difficult to overstate how rapid industrial policy’s rise has been in progressive thinking and US policy more broadly.

Time to read up on the WTO's General Agreement on Trade in Services and Modes 1 and 2. Thanks to Summers, Geithner, and others, the GATS had some consequences for financial sector deregulation lock-in. Now it could matter more broadly for facilitating offshoring of remote work.

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1565342912724226050

Some background on GATS and finance
citizen.typepad.com/eyesontrade/20…

"For the first time since the modern era of climate politics began more than 30 years ago, the United States can credibly claim to be a leader on climate change." - @robinsonmeyer breaks down the ways the IRA will reshape global climate politics.
theatlantic.com/science/archiv… This by @greenlawchina is particularly astute.

I am sympathetic to the view that - when the views of NGOs and elected officials (in legislatures, unions etc) conflict - policymakers should give a lot of deference to the latter. But if we're going to be absolutist about this democratic theory principle on pipelines, we probably should be on student debt too.

With this nutty news cycle, neoliberal economists may have irreversibly burned the bridge to the only one of the two major US political parties that favors democracy and is against states subjecting half their population into forced labor.

https://twitter.com/arindube/status/1563525258782863360

And for what? We're hearing very public cries of fire over (potentially) interesting findings for an academic seminar, when there is a democracy-ravaging fire around the corner.

https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/1563485999615070210

Democrats Might Get Exceptionally Lucky This Fall, and They Should Be Ready for That- another great piece by @jbouie

GOP has lost generic congressional ballot lead & has flawed Senate candidates, while House Dems chances are about what Trump's were in '16
nytimes.com/2022/08/26/opi… Bouie suggests we pivot from industrial policy to social policy, highlighting the child tax credit, reproductive rights, labor rights, and voting rights as priorities.

Yet, with the exception of voting, these could all be also conceived of as industrial policy, or related to IP.

When society runs harmful experiments on humans, society should repair the damage to those humans.

It's pretty simple, and it should be the bare minimum of living in a civil society and democracy.

https://twitter.com/SuzMKahn/status/1562467004912922631

Biden's student debt cancellation is a win and sets a precedent for broader reparative policies of the kind @FeliciaWongRI and @kstrickland_ discuss here @DemJournal in their piece on moving past neoliberalism and racial liberalism.
democracyjournal.org/arguments/beyo…

This🧵 includes some important historical institutionalist-type points about the setting of when a bunch of stuff got built during the New Deal era versus the (early) postindustrial timing of the post 1970s environmental movement.

Some random reflections...

https://twitter.com/JesseJenkins/status/1562106558443667456

Another HI point: the China trade shock and those that preceded it, contributing to much of capital, labor, and communities seeing less of a stake in material production. Goods show up on shelves, they're cheap, which is a lifesaver since wages are kept low + there aren't unions.

It's not every (any previous?) USTR that gets invited to give a keynote at a major labor convention. Here's @AmbassadorTai at the @steelworkers convention in Nevada.

https://twitter.com/AmbassadorTai/status/1557421104444182529

Full remarks here:
ustr.gov/about-us/polic…

"the Inflation Reduction Act would sweeten the pot, with the government extending the full $7,500 tax credit through 2032 while scrapping the 200,000 unit ceiling, which has already affected Tesla, GM and Toyota..."
washingtonpost.com/climate-enviro… "For more modest income earners, the tax credit will be refundable, meaning that regardless of the buyer’s income, the purchase price reflects the full tax credit..."

Political lanes post-Dobbs (from smallest to largest?):

1. Forced labor, with modest increases in the social safety net. 👇

https://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1556691180368314372

2. Forced labor, with a palpable lust for rolling back the existing safety net:

"This is not a new idea. This is a dumb old idea,” anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, said of family support — adding that it keeps showing up “like herpes or shingles.”

Absolutely bizarre editorial decision to cap off 1.5 years of coverage of dinging Dems for not passing their agenda with an above the fold opinion piece by a retired columnist whose piece is less about IRA and more about how the right economic policy is... quietism? So children, the moral of the story is not that lack of party discipline or corruption - you know, the angles we've covered extensively - were the problem, it was trying to do anything at all. Why do you care so much? Sit back and let class discipline work its magic.