Comment by resters

These are good points. In my view the idea that "making America great" entails illiberal economic policies which benefit a small fraction at the expense of the rest of the population is a non-starter because in my view "greatness" does not come from propping up outdated industries (coal extraction, steel production) and taxing everyone else to do it.

I don't think economists are ideologically opposed to central planning. There are simply enough empirical studies that show how badly it fails. In fact most of the "economic liberalization" failure stories you refer to are actually centrally planned thefts that benefit specific firms but were sold as liberalization.

China is an example of a state that does very smart central planning. Everything from its central bank to its subsidization of small businesses doing embedded systems (hence all the super cheap gear on Amazon sent via subsidized shipping to customers around the world) is intended to enhance the capability of the workforce and guide the workforce toward a future of technological change and rapid (but not too rapid) advancement.

In other words, China's industrial policy is forward-looking, America's is backward-looking. The very phrase "Make America Great Again" is backward-looking.

China's policy is essentially an education policy disguised as trade policy. Corporate espionage leads to more knowledge, subsidized shipping leads to more low-end consumer devices and engineers who need to learn to build them, etc. There thousands and thousands of low-end consumer electronics, test equipment, etc., manufactured in China that are built upon the many low-end DSP chips and microcontrollers. This is not an Apple-esque 2nm process, it's much lower tech, lower cost but it offers far, far better experience to so many more workers than all but the best educational background can offer. What percentage of first or second year US EE grads could build and ship a $50 spectrum analyzer?

In my view, China has already overtaken the US in key areas of technological innovation and the US is "copying" by deploying industrial policy that has the opposite effect and entrenches and protects top US firms while having minimal educational impact on US workers and minimal impact on educational and early career choices for US workers.