Ms. Foroohar, in her essay, on the deteriorating relations between China and Trump, offers some thoughts on the fate of Neo-Liberalism, or have I misread?
Headline: China wants to decouple from US tech, too
Sub-headline:Washington’s restrictions have only sped Beijing’s development of its own ecosystem
…
Certainly, it sounds simpler than what the US is now trying to do, which is rebuild the supply chains it has spent the past several decades outsourcing to the East. That is the advantage of having a coherent national industrial policy, as China does. The US abandoned such planning decades ago with the rise of neoliberalism, which held that capital, goods and labour should flow freely without any government restriction.
The problem is that the free market first approach doesn’t work quite as well in a crisis. Right after the pandemic began, for example, I interviewed the chief executives of numerous apparel companies, who were ready and eager to retool to make masks in order to fill the shortage in hospitals. They were the ones prodding the White House to help them co-ordinate these efforts, rather than the other way around. Nobody in the administration had a clue about what manufacturing resources might be immediately available to fill the PPE gaps, or how to better deploy them in a crisis.…
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