[mitigatedchaos]

Protectionism is supposed to be an evil bastion of inefficiency, but I’m not so sure that, in a loose sense over the policy space of various protectionisms, none of them are wise policy.

It isn’t just about protecting a baby industry in your country while it develops, but *also* there is the matter of retaining a network of industry necessary to achieve economies of scale in the first place, which may also have an impact on other industries. The marginal cost of the first auto factory is much higher since it includes the entire rest of the supplier network!

Motorola’s attempt to build a phone in the US did not fail due to insufficient virtue of the American worker (“shame on you for not living in a company barracks! lazy! so lazy!”), but rather the lack of this network, and we must also NOT ignore the political and geopolitical environment, where a slight marginal cost may be worth paying in order to avoid strengthening major ideological and political rivals.

[mitigatedchaos]

@neoliberalism-nightly

um, you mean that the virtue of the american worker was insufficient to overcome the apparent lack of the relevant supply chains. you could change either of them, or some combination, and other variables that are unspecified but yet still exogenous.

In this case, I am not praising American workers as exceptionally virtuous.  (Though they do work long hours by the standards of developed economies in Europe, our colleagues in Japan and Korea are very busy people indeed.)

Rather, there is an implicit argument that, in order to compete with China, America must go to the level of the Industrious Chinese Laborers living in company barracks, and remove its environmental tyranny and let the rivers run red with nickel processing runoff.  That the failure to do so is a moral failure of the American people to compete adequately in the global economy.

I think, instead, that it is possible for America (and the other developed nations) to have some of these industries without doing so, assuming the correct policies are in play.

Speaking of environmental tyranny, undermining the ability of companies to engage in environmental arbitrage which allows them to get away with not paying the true costs of their environmental externalities would be one method to push for this in terms of policy vectors.