An article in The New Yorker, written by Nicholas Lemann, and dating back to October 28, 2024, outlined a kind of "blueprint" for a successful industrial policy, giving credit to then-President Joseph Biden. The word "blueprint" was not, actually, used. That's my way of understanding the article.
Lemann's article is titled, "Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America. Why Has No One Noticed?" If you are a subscriber to The New Yorker, I think there will be no problem getting to the article by clicking the link. If you are not a subscriber, a paywall may well prevent you from reading the article. I hope it doesn't. I think the article is well worth reading, not only for the background it provides on some very significant economic legislation, but also because I think the article suggests a new (and better) way for our federal government to relate to our economic life. Here are a couple of key paragraphs:
Bidenomics upends a set of economic assumptions that have prevailed in both parties for most of the past half century. Biden is the first President in decades to treat government as the designer and ongoing referee of markets, rather than as the corrector of markets’ dislocations and excesses after the fact. He doesn’t speak of free trade and globalization as economic ideals. His approach to combatting climate change involves no carbon taxes or credits—another major departure, not just from his predecessors but also from the policies of many other countries. His Administration has been far more aggressive than previous ones in taking antitrust actions against big companies.
What would you call these policies? One apt label might be “post-neoliberal,” a term that does not resonate at all with the public. Another way of thinking about Biden’s approach is through terminology devised by the political scientist Jacob Hacker: it rejects redistribution as a guiding liberal principle, in favor of “predistribution,” an effort to transform the economy in a way that makes redistribution less necessary (emphasis added).
Rephrased, what Lemann is saying is that it is possible for the federal government (on behalf of the people of the United States) to outline what kind of economic conditions we want, and then to use the economic and other powers of the federal government to shape the economy to achieve that vision. Biden is no longer the president, but perhaps we can we learn something from what he did when he was.
In essence, what this article suggests is that the people of the United States should not let key policy decisions be made by individual economic actors (very often corporations, or "private equity") whose aims are, of course, to benefit themselves. Instead, the idea is for the federal government, on behalf of us all, to decide what sort of economy we want, and then to use federal power to direct the corporations to achieve it. For those who are not fans of former president Biden, please let me be clear that this idea is independent of the credit given to Biden in Lemann's article.
Who comes first, the people or the corporations? Lemann is saying that we have always assumed that the corporations come first, and that we, then, take governmental action to react to, and perhaps "correct," what corporations do.
Why don't we just tell them what to do in the first place? That's the idea. That's a kind of "blueprint" for an economic and industrial policy that is completely different from what we have taken for granted in the past.
Sounds like a very good idea to me! Now, can we do it? We can sure start trying!
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