Dear gentle readers: Apologies for a somewhat ragged Coffee Break today. Traveling in Scotland and time has been taken up with details (all good) along with a few unexpected disconnects (as in stuff happens).
Part the First: Scientists to the Rescue? Economic growth is not the answer to any of our problems in this finite world. Development without increased material and energy throughput in the economy is possible, however. This has been recognized for a long time by the few perspicacious heterodox economists who realize that economics is not a natural science despite its excessive and generally spurious theoretical mathematization. This truth has never quite penetrated the world of conventional “economic sciences,” for which the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded since 1969.
“Growth at any cost leaves us all poorer.” Those were the words of United Nations secretary-general António Guterres last week at the launch of a landmark report, Counting What Counts, which he commissioned from a team of researchers and policymakers (www.un.org/beyondgdp). It proposes how countries can move beyond gross domestic product (GDP), the world’s main indicator for the health of economies.
GDP has its roots in a concept proposed in the 1930s (see go.nature.com/4324jwf; this is a pdf download of Simon Kuznets’s paper from 1934 on national income), and GDP growth has since become the main economic-policy objective for most governments. Drops in GDP are often seen by markets, the media and commentators as a sign of government incompetence. However, this kind of growth has coincided with persistent inequality and environmental degradation worldwide, as the report says. If economic development is to benefit as many people as possible and to be sustainable in the long term, a measure is needed that captures these factors — and GDP does not.
The authors have compiled 31 indicators, covering human rights, peace and respect for the planet, that they recommend governments measure (see Nature https://doi.org/q57n; 2026). Of these, 15 are already indicators for the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The report also recommends that a committee of scientists be appointed to work on one or more headline indicators that could aggregate variables into one quantity, much as GDP does. The governments of Spain and Guyana have been handed the baton to take the recommendations forwards.
The invitation of scientists to participate in the process is a welcome development, because until now the theory and application of GDP has mostly been the preserve of economists and economic statisticians. Any effort to distil the 31 indicators into a few headline statistics will need input from many disciplines. All who are involved in the next phase must study previous efforts to complement GDP and learn from past successes and failures. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to correct a long-standing flaw. (emphasis added)
Sustainable development (not growth!) is much to be desired, and the only way for development to be sustainable is for it to not contribute (very much) to the breakdown of the ecosphere in a full world. Now comes this effort to get scientists involved.
Can scientists really help? That remains to be seen. Personally I am not particularly optimistic, because most scientists’ understanding of political economy is nil. Many preen that they are above politics. More than a few in my experience are in love with the flat income tax, now that they have become “middle class” with family incomes at 3-5 times the median family income in the United States. Then there is the parlous state of the scientific community, much of this self-inflicted. To be of any help, scientists must move very far beyond their “comfort zones.” As for a report prepared by a “High-level Expert Group on Beyond GDP,” this is a natural target for politicians from all sides, especially among those on top at the moment.
Besides, Herman Daly and John B. Cobb, Jr. developed the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare (ISEW) in For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future in 1989 (this revision is still in print and remains as fresh as it was 37 years ago). There is no mention of this work in the 49-page UN report (download here), but the ISEW is the natural place to start. Continually reinventing the wheel will never get us anywhere we need to go, but it will keep the logs rolling for the powers that be who need, above all, to keep their grift in perpetual motion.
Part the Second: Democrats Send the President Sternly Worded Letters. We discussed the firing of the entire National Science Board two weeks ago. Earlier this week we read that Congressional Democrats have responded with those dreaded sternly worded letters: Democratic lawmakers demand Trump explain – and reverse – termination of NSF’s governing board:
Democrats in Congress are criticizing President Donald Trump’s unprecedented firing of all members of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) governing board—and demanding answers on what the administration plans to do next.
“Dismissing the full [board] without explanation, without replacement, and without plans to ensure continuity of the Board’s work is an assault on both the independence of American science and the rule of law,” states a letter sent today (pdf) to Trump and NSF by 26 senators, led by Ed Markey (D–MA) and Maria Cantwell (WA), the senior Democrat on the committee that oversees NSF.
A second letter sent today (pdf) led by Representative Zoe Lofgren (CA), the senior Democrat on the House of Representatives science panel, and signed by 31 lawmakers, takes an even stronger stance. “We write to you to express our outrage,” the letter begins, “and we demand that you re-appoint the 22 non-partisan [members of the board] so they can resume their vital work in providing steady, expert advice to [NSF].”
…
The senators want answers by 29 May. The administration is not legally required to reply to the letter, however, and as the Senate’s minority party, Democrats have limited options for compelling a response.
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Under the Trump administration, NSF has suffered a series of blows, including the loss of its building, a 30% cut to staff, and repeated attempts to cut its budget by more than half. The agency is currently far behind its traditional pace in doling out new awards. (emphasis added)
Okay then. I am certain this will work as well as it has done in the past! While the current administration eviscerates American science (the management of which can and should be improved), the Democrats in Congress reinvent this creaky wheel one more time.
Part the Third: COVID-19 Sequelae. Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina is probably the leading coronavirus virologist in the world. He has had a productive and distinguished career and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. Nevertheless the Department of Health and Human Services remains unimpressed:
Alleging a “pattern of deception” in virus studies done more than a decade ago, the U.S. government has proposed a ban on federal funding to a prominent coronavirus researcher whose more recent work has incited unproven accusations that he helped start the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has already suspended Ralph Baric, a tenured professor at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), from receiving further money for his virology studies. Now, it has begun formal debarment proceedings, which could cut off his funding for 3 years or more. As Science finalized this story, UNC announced that Baric, 72, was retiring, but he told Science he plans to appeal the recommended debarment, likely with legal help from the school.
Baric received details of the allegations (pdf) in a 7 May email from HHS, one of several documents he shared with Science. HHS accuses him of deception in communications with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has provided his lab and collaborators with awards that total more than $200 million over the past 40 years.
Most of the charges center on mouse experiments done with bat coronaviruses in 2014, which HHS contends created a virus that had a “gain of function” (GOF), becoming more dangerous and potentially posing serious risks to human health. On an unrelated charge, HHS says Baric was “not forthcoming” about a 2017 grant from the Wellcome Trust, a private biomedical funder, that the department says overlapped with one he received from NIAID and should have been declared to the agency.
Much of the creaky political foundation for these accusations is based on the politics of the current Secretary of Health and Human Services:
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. And its suspension letter does not mention SARS-CoV-2, let alone allege that Baric helped create it. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his 2023 book The Wuhan Cover-Up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race (the blurbs identify this book as the political screed that it is; the same is true for RFKJr’s “book” on the real Anthony Fauci) attempted to link Baric’s work to the origin of the pandemic because he collaborated with researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on the 2014 experiments. The first outbreak of COVID-19 occurred in Wuhan, and Kennedy and others argue SARS-CoV-2 escaped from WIV—and may have been created there rather than being a natural virus (Editors’ note: The book repeatedly criticizes COVID-19 origin reporting by Science and this reporter.)
Kennedy’s view has increasingly gained traction with Republicans in Congress and President Donald Trump’s administration despite a lack of direct evidence and other data suggesting the virus jumped into people from an animal host at a Wuhan food market. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), has frequently referred to a “lab-leak coverup.” And Trump has publicly championed the theory as well.
Virologist Robert Redfield, who was director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during Trump’s first term and the start of the pandemic, has gone further still with regard to Baric. “I think there is a real possibility that the virus’ birthplace was Chapel Hill,” Redfield said on a podcast in 2024. He has called Baric “the scientific mastermind” of a Chinese government project to engineer the virus. Reflecting the lack of evidence around the possible lab-leak scenario, another camp asserts Baric did not create the virus, but taught the WIV scientists the methods they used to make it.
If SARS-CoV-2 escaped by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan, one would have expected the scientists in the laboratory to have been the first to become ill from COVID-19. This apparently did not happen. Still, it is not unreasonable to consider that this coronavirus research was conducted in Wuhan due to different regulatory requirements than those in the United States. As it is, the likelihood is small that the exact origins of SARS-CoV-2 will ever be known with certainty. But what is clear is that the political and scientific establishments did not respond to the pandemic very well. And the problem with that is they still don’t seem to get it, as the muddled responses to the recent hantavirus outbreak have demonstrated.
Part the Fourth: The Editor of Science Interviews Timothy Snyder. I have been reading Science regularly for a very long time. This interview may be the first such thing I have seen in the flagship journal of American science. It is, as they say, interesting. But first, who is Timothy Snyder? Most general readers will know him as the author of the short book, On Tyranny, that he published in 2017. He left Yale for the University of Toronto in 2025 during the early days of the current administration’s crackdown on American universities. From H. Holden Thorpe, editor of Science, Lessons in resistance from Tim Snyder:
Federal grant cancellations, restrictions on immigration for foreign scientists, and attempts to cut the budgets of science funding agencies by 60%—the past 18 months have been tumultuous for American science. Even after Congress restored the budgets, following the successful lobbying by leaders of the scientific community, universities are still hampered by the slow dispersal of the appropriated funds. Meanwhile, the continual attacks on science and the uncertainty brought on by the Trump administration have put many scientists in a state of fear and anxiety about the future of the American scientific enterprise, or at the very least, whiplash over the dizzying pace of defeats and victories. Equally nerve-wracking are the differing perspectives across the scientific community on the best course of action.
Across the United States, graduate students, postdocs, and principal investigators are unsure what to do in this environment. Their universities might be sending signals to stay out of the fray—perhaps by restricting protest areas or emphasizing a neutral campus climate lest they or the institution get singled out for a federal investigation or the loss of funding. At the same time, colleagues might be pressuring them to join the latest protest, suggesting a duty to defend science.
To help the scientific community sort through these contrary signals, I’ve started talking to experts for advice and context. I had the opportunity to speak with Timothy Snyder, a professor at the University of Toronto who studies authoritarian movements in history. His 2017 best-selling book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century is a guide for resisting and fighting back in times like this. The first lesson, arguably the most famous, is “do not obey in advance,” often invoked by those advocating for more resistance as universities and associations grapple with demands from the Trump administration. But Snyder has 19 other lessons and I talked with him about how to balance them all, especially “protect institutions” and “remember professional ethics.” I was curious to know how he would apply these lessons—usually discussed in the context of topics like immigration or the rule of law—to the scientific process and community.
The interview is here (36:05) and worth consideration. Pericles and Trotsky were correct. One thing the current administration has done is show that whether or not scientists are “interested in politics” (most are happily ensconced in their own thick, little bubble) is immaterial because politics is certainly interested in them.
Part the Fifth: Wither Food. I have spent the past five days in the Kingdom of Fife surrounded by fertile agricultural land that is well tended and by all outward appearances very productive. Nevertheless, James Rebanks asks the question: Could Britain run out of food? Apparently it could:
Modern agriculture requires a safe and stable flow of fossil fuels, and so is deeply affected by what is happening in the Middle East. Two of the biggest costs for British farmers are fuel and fertiliser, and the prices of both are soaring. Growing crops requires a lot of fuel — whether you’re ploughing, drilling and spraying crops or harvesting, drying and refrigerating them. Farmers are given some duty-relief on fuel in the form of red diesel, which helps to keep food prices down for consumers. But in wartime, this is not enough. Red diesel for my farm was 70-75p per litre before President Donald Trump sent in the first missiles. It is now more like £1-£1.15 per litre.
Then there’s synthetic fertiliser, which is the biggest single variable cost for many farmers. In recent decades, the world’s food production system has become heavily reliant upon ammonia and sulphur from the Middle East. Around a third of the global trade in raw materials for synthetic fertilisers flows through the Strait of Hormuz. So the crisis has caused the price of fertiliser to skyrocket.
Right now, it is crop planting season. Farmers have two choices in the face of rising expenses — buy less fertiliser and accept lower yields, or buy fertiliser at the inflated prices and pass on the higher costs to the consumer. Either way, food will become much more expensive.
The farmers I’ve spoken to this week say that the cost of growing crops in the UK has risen because of the war by as much as £150-£250 per hectare. That’s £30,000-£50,000 in extra costs for a typical 200-hectare arable farm. At this rate, some nitrogen-hungry crops, such as wheat, barley and oilseed rape, might not be worth planting this year. Farmers are nervous of borrowing tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds to get a crop in the ground when they know they’re probably not going to get a fair return on their investment. Jack Highwood, who farms in Kent, tells me he used to grow 300-400 acres of arable crops, mainly milling wheat — “enough to feed Kent for a week”. But he has stopped sowing crops because the cost of growing is now above the market price.
Either we learn to do better, sustainably, or we get hungry and stay that way. But for institutional obstacles, this is not a hard problem to solve. We will return to this in the coming weeks in a discussion of How the World Eats: A Global Food Philosophy by the inimitable Julian Baggini.
Thank you for reading! See you next week, after local primary elections in my part of the country.
Travel note: If your book budget is strained and/or your luggage is full already, stay out of Topping & Company Booksellers of St. Andrews.
Baric, the latest victim of Covid 19 lab leak conspiracy theory, one of the most popular conspiracies ever. When wills replace proofs to prove something.
I’ve been thinking about how grotesque cooking shows & food porn are going to look if/when the target yuppie audience of those shows themselves start going hungry or unfed.
Maybe they’ll replace them with shows about dumpster diving, or (more helpfully) shows on how to grow your own food and replace some of those now prohibitively expensive store- or restaurant-bought meals with one’s own produce? One can only hope.
Maybe not. During the Great Depression, people like to watch new Hollywood films showing rich people having parties with lashings of food. Go figure.
The Thin Man being the classic example of this.
The Trump administration is certainly an enemy of science and education in general. It is not the first to politicize, bias, and/or reduce government support for scientific research, but as with every other undesirable policy area it has done this more blatantly and extensively than those who came before. It deserves all the scrutiny and condemnation critics can give it here.
But reading this is a reminder that the enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Timothy Snyder is indeed a noted academic, an “expert” on Russia and Eastern Europe. As such, from his position at Yale (before he fled to Canada to avoid the coming Trumpian Holocaust), he was also one of the most effective anti-Russia, anti-Putin, and Russiagate propagandists around. Given his credentials, his views were especially influential for well-educated liberals. That Science would choose Snyder for this unusual (for them) lesson on “resistance” is, indeed, “interesting.” I have not read his book On Tyranny; it might be good. But I have read enough of his work on Russia to form an opinion on his historical objectivity. It doesn’t mean I’d want to censor him, of course. But it does remind me that some “experts” are more like to be chosen by Science than others.
I have a similar reaction to holding up Baric as an example, though I’m not going to get into the weeds on that here. Trump’s HHH under Kennedy is worthless. But there are legitimate questions about Baric’s actions that do not depend on the opinions of those clowns.
Yes, Baric, Daszak, and Fauci have a lot of questions to answer. Where did that furin cleavage site come from, after all?
Reconstruction of Nations was quite good, even if his biases were obvious. Snyder seemed to get increasingly more unhinged after that, though, even in his “academic” work. In many ways, I’d describe him as someone who uses his tenure and academic prestige based on past work to advance his personal agendas, exactly the kind of academic one should avoid like the plague. Yes, it is telling that it should be him that Science should interview.
One thing that left me really soured on scientific publication trying to politics is my experience interviewing with one of Nature publications when I was about to leave official academia. On paper, I must have looked really good: originally from hard science background but with a social science PhD and half a dozen years on tenure track. But when I laid out my view that engagng in overt “political” advocacy is the last thing scientists and scientific publications should be doing if they want to maintain any kind of credibility, the looks on my interviewers’ faces visibly changed. That was exactly the direction they wanted to take and they were expecting that I’d be helping with the “science propaganda” effort if you will. As it were, I do think science should engage with the public, more than ever before. But not in a too crass manner of “propaganda” that talks down to the masses, both intellectually and morally. (Ironically, I found quite a few of my actual scientist friends sympathetic to my view.) Alas, Science editors haven’t learned the lesson, it seems.
To get something straight – regardless of other works by Snyder since which may or may not deserve some merit – Snyder´s world fame was established by his best selling historic study “BLOODLANDS” in 2010.
It established him as a star.
The truth however is this: BLOODLANDS is not a first rate work of scholarship which might have justified the praise but a contrived attempt to sell an anti-Russian narrative in the disguise of an – in part – overblown concept of a Bloodlands, which would not live up to the necessary scholarly consistency and fails scrutiny too often.
The area of the Bloodlands is a fiction. And as is the problem with fiction: It never stands for itself- unlike serious historic scholarship can due to its impeccable methodical results – but always yearns for political recognition. It aims at something other than analysis, it aims beyond scholarship into making politics. Fiction wants to offer solutions where hard questions usually only create the tiny chain pieces of scholarly progress. It wishes to be a giant in a country where only dwarfs can be.
Snyder is thus a promoter of his own persona and I cannot get myself to take him seriously (even if I do him wrong here) – for every one such interview with him – there are a dozen other true experts who could give maybe more adequate answers.
I wholeheartedly agree, but having said that they’ll probably go for Anne Applebaum next.
Timothy Snider is a war promoter and Russophobe par excellence. He is to academia what Nuland is to diplomacy. Just one example: in his writing the famine in the USSR in the Thirties is not only proof of the genocidal proclivities of the Russian empire in its then current reincarnation but also in its past and future. He tars Russia with having a uniquely dark history and extends that darkness into the present and future. If you look at history in this way you could state exactly the same about his beloved beacons of freedom and democracy i.e. Great Britain and the USA which have inflicted no less horrors on the world. But that is not the way Snyder and his ilk look at the world. His history is of the dark vs. light variety. The elves vs. Mordor. Very convenient if you want to start another war and make lot’s of money. Whatever you might say about Trump: at least he replied we have enough murderers of our own when asked whether Putin was a murderer. That isn´t a thought that would ever enter the head of people like Snyder.
Timothy Snyder is an inveterate hack, full stop.
“do not obey in advance”
Good advice but easier said than done? Sophie Scholl probably didn’t think she would be guillotined for handing out leaflets until a few minutes before her last. Power is not only cruel but also arbitrary as seen with Potus.
And then there’s “especially “protect institutions””, followed after a bounce with, “but for institutional obstacles, this is not a hard problem to solve.”
So, here we are.
Feels like Maine: “you can’t get there from here.” Perhaps a Mainer will show us the way!
From the article, “GDP growth has since become the main economic-policy objective for most governments. Drops in GDP are often seen by markets, the media and commentators as a sign of government incompetence.” I would say that the growth at all costs got going with Reagan’s push to free the free market by cutting taxes for the wealthy, deregulation and weakening the power of labor. This was partly a response to the stagnation of the 70s were real GDP growth averaged 3.2%. People were disappointed because real growth in the 50s and 60s averaged 4.4%, so the 70s were a bit of a shock. However, Reagan’s revolution did not spur real GDP growth, it averaged the same 3.2% for the 80s and 90s. But wait there’s more – since 2000, real GDP growth has averaged a paltry 2.2% – and that is combined with the US government pumping $34 trillion into the economy to boost economic growth.(GDP data from BEA.gov and Debt figures from: https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/datasets/debt-to-the-penny/debt-to-the-penny) I don’t hear any Neoliberal economists talking about how slow growth has been since 2000 except as an argument to deregulate or cut taxes to the wealthy. To me, the numbers show that Reagan’s changes are a failure.
I do get that unlimited growth on a finite planet is mathematically possible. However what we are seeing is economic stagnation dressed-up as a growth economy. Logically, in any year where the dollar value of real GDP growth is less than the size of the federal deficit – the economy isn’t growing. That would pretty much describe every year for the US since 2005 except for the Covid rebound year in 2021. To me there is a problem with lack of economic growth and a larger problem of distributing growth so the whole of society can benefit.
It’s important to remember that the Federal deficit does not exist in a vacuum — it is mathematically identical to the sum of domestic savings and the foreign sector surplus (this is known as the Sectoral Balances Identity).
Growth in US spending “leaks” into the rest of world, boosting rest of world GDP growth, because US imports so much.
I think this statement, “Logically, in any year where the dollar value of real GDP growth is less than the size of the federal deficit – the economy isn’t growing “, is not true. The domestic output that is purchased by Federal deficit spending is real output produced by the domestic economy, and if aggregate real domestic output increases, that is growth (regardless of how the output growth is funded). Over time, the ratio of Federal debt to GDP will converge to the ratio of the Federal deficit (as a fraction of GDP) to the rate of real GDP growth. For a monetary sovereign nation such, as US, there is in principle no sustainability concern (the government cannot be forced into default) in terms of funding these deficits (but there are very real inflation concerns due to constraints on productive capacity).
These issues and much, much more, are covered in Randall Wray’s excellent MMT Primer.
Growth in US spending also leaks into the rest of the world because the US imports more from the world than it sells. When that happens debt to the rest of the world, increases because the US is paying for imports with money/debt or by selling assets instead of selling goods and tradeable services. It would not be so leaky if the country had balanced trade.
Think about a growing economy where there is a balanced budget. When that happens the money that governments take in is equal to the money that it spends. When the economy slows, governments tend to inject money into the economy through deficit spending in order to boost demand and growth. Sometimes governments issue bonds and increase debt, other times they create money for deficit spending. In the case where a government creates money, it also creating debt because each created dollar is a claim on the domestic economy.
As I have shown, US economic growth has been decelerating for decades. Going from over 4% real growth to 2.2% real growth and that 2.2% is boosted by deficit spending causing a higher debt burden. Since FY16, the average deficit has been $2 trillion or about 6% of GDP. In the years after WWII, the US was able to reduce the size of its federal debt as a percentage of its economy and now the federal debt is growing three times faster than the economy. What would Randall say about that? What would he say about over 50 consecutive years of US trade deficits? How does sovereign money fix what has happened to US economic growth?
Please read the MMT Primer. There is a lot of understanding to be found there.
Regarding the decline of the debt/GDP ratio after WWII, it’s important to remember that the US had large trade surpluses with the rest of the world for decades after the end of the war. US GDP grew rapidly. Debt/GDP ratio fell rapidly, and absolute levels of Federal debt could be reduced (I have no idea whether this actually happened, but it certainly could have) because Federal surpluses were mathematically possible, on account of the US trade surplus.
The present circumstances are very different from conditions after the end of WWII, It is a mathematical impossibility for US government budget to be in balance while the US private sector is in balance or in surplus (net domestic private saving) and the foreign sector is in surplus (ie, US trade in deficit). The surpluses of the three sectors (US government, US non-government, and external) sum to zero as a mathematical identity.
The trade deficits of recent decades are the result of deliberate policy of trade liberalization (which had the effect, as the rest of world repaired itself after WWII, of offshoring US manufacturing; this started before the WHO; for decades under GATT there was progressive liberalization of international trade), and the federal budget deficits necessarily followed.
The MMT Primer really is worth one’s time. It’s a book length treatment, about 50 chapters, each of which is perhaps a 10 minute read.
I have read MMT primers and heard interviews with Randall, from what I have seen MMT is a reaction to the logical inconsistency where the right-wing keeps saying there isn’t enough money for people but always finding money for tax cuts and wars. They came up with a proposition that in a fiat money system all sovereigns can create their own money. The proposition is couched in normalizing assumptions that don’t really hold in the real world, but hey – that doesn’t stop them from trying to apply it to the real world. Parts of it I agree with. For example, if I offer you a promissory not to buy something off you, I am a monetary sovereign, Big Whoop! I have created money and I have created debt – the first step is easy – now the interesting part is who am I going to get to accept debt? Didn’t Minsky say something about that?
What do you mean by large trade surpluses? Please show me the numbers and source. I have a trade surplus of around 1% of GDP.
Yes the present circumstances are different from the end of WWII, because the US started deindustrializing decades ago. American companies offshored production first to get under tariff barriers and then because it was profitable. Then they lobbied governments to loosen trade rules so they could offshore even more. How does sovereign money fix that?
The post WWII story is more of an excuse for deindustrialization. The US could have protected its people with tariffs and deals like the autopact – but no. Instead it signed free trade deals with countries that had labor costs 1/20th of those in the US. I hope you can see that the WHO and GATT were not working for the average citizen.
I suggest you read the MMT primer critically.
Regarding your last question, US could reindustrialize, but it would require intentional policy. A precedent for the efficacy of industrial policy can be seen in the policies (funded by US sovereign money and facilitated by the then vast US natural resources base) that bulked up US manufacturing to function as “arsenal of democracy” during WWII. Tariff or tax policy could, in principle, change the incentive for importation vs domestic manufacture. I have the impression that DJT’s tariff policies are not changing things very much; perhaps such policies could be better designed.
My sense of the matter is that while industrial policy can in principle re-industrialize US, the neoliberal ideology of the ruling elites makes this a disfavored option, so the power of sovereign money to make real world changes will not be utilized (at least not in good ways; we can see that it is being utilized for destructive purposes and presumably this will continue).
Neoliberalism makes it impossible. Sequence of operations to re-industrialize from where we are now:
1. Provide early life quality housing for all (can’t tell who’s going to end up being a good worker)
2. Provide quality early life diet for all (can’t tell who’s going to end up being a good worker)
3. Provide quality early life education (can’t tell who’s going to end up being the innovator of superior robots, quantum computing, life saving etc.)
4. Establish market structures to incentivize sustainable development.
5. Sustain 1 though 3 for 15-20 years while forcing capitalist to reinvest in real world, sustainable development.
6. Engage qualified workforce in innovative improvements to eco/material conditions.
As you observe the first 5 points violate the first rule, “because markets”, while the last violates the second, “go die”!
I actually asked what Randall’s MMT policy was for deindustrialization and slow growth. I have read all the Classical economists and most of the Neoclassical ones that are worth reading. To me the deceleration of the US economy due to a policy of offshoring is one of the biggest problems facing the country. It has led to slower growth, higher deficits, wage stagnation and greater inequality. Surely Randall and MMT have some study of it.
Sorry, late to this.
First point, industrial policy is orthogonal to MMT. MMT is descriptive, and allows one to understand the degree of fiscal freedom governments have in implementing whatever policies the ruling elites prefer. US still has considerable freedom, but less than in the mid/late-1900s due to resource depletion (autarkic states have a great deal of freedom because they are the least constrained by the cost of external inputs) and gradual decline in the attractiveness of the USD as a store of value.
Different MMT people will have different approaches to industrial policy. My perception of Wray’s approach is that he is not troubled by offshoring per se (over the short term, receiving real goods in exchange for promises of future payment seems like a favorable exchange), but thinks that USG should aggressively invest in the development of new industries to employ the people who are affected by the domestic decline of the industries that are offshored.
Another adaptation favored by Wray (and by many, most or perhaps all MMT people) is the Job Guarantee concept — in which USG functions as “employer of last resort”, a parallel to the Federal Reserve function of “lender of last resort”. There is a significant section on the Job Guarantee at the MMT Primer. New Deal employment programs are a precedent. A lot of useful infrastructure was built during that period.
Wray emphatically does not think that US industrial offshoring with essentially no adaptations to repurpose the affected populations was a good thing.
An interesting problem at the present time is that an industrial policy aimed simply at returning industries to US that are currently concentrated in China would add to world production overcapacity.
This may be an intractable problem. My private sense is that we need something resembling the WWII US command economy to mobilize productive capacity toward mitigation/adaptation to climate change, but again there are ideological obstacles both to acknowledgement of the problem and implementation of solutions.
I’ll add that “slow growth” may not itself be the problem. The rapid US GDP growth in the post-war period was clearly due to exceptional circumstances and to use that period as the baseline for comparison with the present period will lead to unreasonable expectations about what is possible at the present time.
Distributional issues are arguably more important for population well-being than is the rate of increase of aggregate output. (This point is repeatedly made by Yves, that internal distributional equality is a stronger predictor of population well-being than is absolute level of per-capita GDP). This aligns with the generally-favored-by-MMT-people agenda of using fiscal policy to maximize employment (the Job Guarantee).
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My perception is that in US public discourse, rapid growth is seen as the solution to distributional inequality because in principle it could improve the condition of the least well off without changing the skew of distribution of wealth. It’s the default solution because high degrees of inequality are not questioned.
A final thought is that what is needed in present circumstances is not “more absolute output” but rather (among many other things), “ways to sustainably produce what the population needs.”
So many aspects of our economy are unsustainable. A single example is that food production is reliant on synthetic fertilizers that are produced from resources extracted from a finite and depleting resource base.
If one were to turn the clock back a couple of hundred years, to the beginning of the synthetic chemistry revolution, it could have been foreseen that environmental pollution by synthetic polymers would eventually become a problem and that a “circular economy” for plastics should be pursued from the outset. Going back further, to the beginning of the “fossil carbon as energy source” revolution, it could have been foreseen that this resource was not limitless and that a civilization built on this energy source would eventually run into problems. By the late 1800s, the problem of atmospheric CO2 was recognized; more than a century later, we are still struggling to actually do meaningful things about this.
We seem to have an irremediably short-term approach to future outcomes. I think that the preference for as-rapid-as-possible growth with little concern for sustainability is a pernicious consequence of this.
Despite Kuznets expressing the view that GDP should not be used as a measure of wellbeing, economists, media and politicians continue to push it as the important metric of economic advancement. GDP is an aggregate measure and all of us and none of us live there but we do live in distributions.
Is it so difficult to reject GDP as a measure of societal wellbeing? Clearly it is once it becomes the narrative of those running the show and has become propagandised into the mainstream as another economic fraud. Even more so when quantities such as imputed rent of owner occupied homes as well as economic rents from the finance industry have been included. Who benefits from that fraud?
Has anyone given a thought how RFJ jr may be depending on the advice of an outside technical consultant for his decisions? Somebody like Laura Loomer?
Doubt it. He was litigating for 2+ decades and knows where all the bodies are buried. Loomer does have influence but it’s Trump and others she has some sway over.
Timothy Snyder the Democrat party bootlicking Nazi apologist and rabid xenophobe?
I dont think he is going to have good advice about anything except maybe a local restaurant recommendation or something…
Very jealous of your Scottish details. I’d urge you to have fun but it seems redundant.
BP, I am convinced it is illegal to have this much fun. Carnoustie yesterday (where KLG Jr had a 75, after a 73 on the Old Course earlier in the week) and Panmure today. Have spent the past two nights in the bar at a small hotel (~8 rooms) in Carnoustie listening to locals discuss soccer and working class life. They are very gracious to the USAsian interlopers. Returning to the world as we know it Sunday.
Fore! I would like to thank the commentariat for confirming my view of Timothy Snyder as a paid-up member of the tenure class and therefore a full-blown, virtue signaling denizen of the PMC. What worries one is that the editor of Science seems not to understand this.
Outstanding. The SPL season just wrapped up dramatically so I imagine it’s been fairly lively, although maybe not so much in Carnoustie!
Celtic vs. Harts had a rapt and rowdy audience in the bar as we were leaving for Panmure!
In the United States of America in 2026, no problem is solvable. Not a single one. And there is no “we” and there never can in a country put together the way this country has been put together. And that; after all, is precisely the point of it all.