Saturday, March 19, 2016
OPEN LETTER TO MS MAZZUCATO
Re The Entrepreneurial State
Dear Ms Mazzucato:
Great book so far. My remarks are rather in the nature of intramural criticisms. I am a sort of neomercantilist, economic nationalist - Western civilizationalist.
You are also a sort of neomercantilist nationalist, it seems to me, having read your book.
These ideas would have been most helpful to Western Nation States until, say, 1919, when they more or less partially turned away from the nation state concept, and also turned rather reluctantly from their Western Empires, toward larger, liberal, multinational, multicultural organizations, as a solution to their perceived problems.
It did not get any better for them after that, up to and through WWII, and then its Cold War aftermath, and then down to the present day.
It got worse.
One big problem, as in so many other fields, with your account, is that it is mainly about economic theory and history, although it touches other areas without really acknowledging doing so, eg industrial policy in developmental states.
You throw up the hidebound contrast between the rigid US and USSR versus Japan, without placing it in a context of both Cold War Soviet preparedness efforts, and US booming the noncommunist world, as well as a defense umbrella for such as Japan.
It really is a failure to characterize the role of government in wider contexts, the very thing you criticize the private sector here for having done, in economics, once again, in isolation from other noneconomic insights.
And I should point out that I am not myself a fan of US foreign policy, trade financial or commercial policy, or military policy, either before or after WWII.
What you have in mind is really a sort of neomercantilism for a state in a position to embrace economic nationalism. That is the only way that nationalist entrepreneurial advantages you discuss might accrue to a given national taxpaying citizenry and its national companies.
Unfortunately with the advent of blind globalization in the latter 20th Century, that is a vanished ideal in the West.
Countries like Japan, Asian Tigers, and later China, have succeeded with it only because they were allowed to by the West and at its expense.
As I have pointed out so often here before:
Never, in the field of human conflict, has so much been given away to so many, by so few, for so little, so quickly.
Your book is yet another testament to the failures I and others have described long ago.
Terms search: trading places, trading american interests, Opening America's Market, developmental state, Steingart, attacker state, Faux, Manufacturing Matters, Chalmers Johnson, MITI, van Wolferen, Steingart, bashing, competitiveness, Friedman LeBard, Michael Porter, Huntington, war for survival, rail to rail, Rodrik, Thurston, etc.
http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2016/03/re-where-we-turned-wrong-way.html
You discuss how the US government recently aggressively protected Apple's and others' intellectual property rights against foreign encroachment, under Fostering An Indigenous Sector...this I tend to doubt, having studied prior US trade policy in this area and others.
Further, neither the state, nor the private sector itself, has any interest in fostering an indigenous IT sector strictly within the territorial and national political confines of the US, and benefiting mainly only US taxpayers.
The history, throughout the 20th Century, shows, to the contrary, that the US has seldom placed domestic economic and commercial interests above foreign policy and so called strategic interests.
Your critique of the idol of entrepreneurship is a bright spot in the narrative. It is always great to explode false myths where one can see them.
Figure 13, great stuff!
http://ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/blog/what-the-steve-jobs-movie-wont-tell-you-about-apples-success
I wouldn't let a billionaire American entrepreneur take out my garbage, not because he couldn't do it, but because I couldn't trust him.
One should not expect Trump to do anything like what he says on trade, perhaps even things you think you support, even if he happens to actually believe it and wants to.
He can't: political structural problems hardly touched on in your book....
All the best
Boomerbuster
Dear Ms Mazzucato:
Great book so far. My remarks are rather in the nature of intramural criticisms. I am a sort of neomercantilist, economic nationalist - Western civilizationalist.
You are also a sort of neomercantilist nationalist, it seems to me, having read your book.
These ideas would have been most helpful to Western Nation States until, say, 1919, when they more or less partially turned away from the nation state concept, and also turned rather reluctantly from their Western Empires, toward larger, liberal, multinational, multicultural organizations, as a solution to their perceived problems.
It did not get any better for them after that, up to and through WWII, and then its Cold War aftermath, and then down to the present day.
It got worse.
One big problem, as in so many other fields, with your account, is that it is mainly about economic theory and history, although it touches other areas without really acknowledging doing so, eg industrial policy in developmental states.
You throw up the hidebound contrast between the rigid US and USSR versus Japan, without placing it in a context of both Cold War Soviet preparedness efforts, and US booming the noncommunist world, as well as a defense umbrella for such as Japan.
It really is a failure to characterize the role of government in wider contexts, the very thing you criticize the private sector here for having done, in economics, once again, in isolation from other noneconomic insights.
And I should point out that I am not myself a fan of US foreign policy, trade financial or commercial policy, or military policy, either before or after WWII.
What you have in mind is really a sort of neomercantilism for a state in a position to embrace economic nationalism. That is the only way that nationalist entrepreneurial advantages you discuss might accrue to a given national taxpaying citizenry and its national companies.
Unfortunately with the advent of blind globalization in the latter 20th Century, that is a vanished ideal in the West.
Countries like Japan, Asian Tigers, and later China, have succeeded with it only because they were allowed to by the West and at its expense.
As I have pointed out so often here before:
Never, in the field of human conflict, has so much been given away to so many, by so few, for so little, so quickly.
Your book is yet another testament to the failures I and others have described long ago.
Terms search: trading places, trading american interests, Opening America's Market, developmental state, Steingart, attacker state, Faux, Manufacturing Matters, Chalmers Johnson, MITI, van Wolferen, Steingart, bashing, competitiveness, Friedman LeBard, Michael Porter, Huntington, war for survival, rail to rail, Rodrik, Thurston, etc.
http://bozonbloggon.blogspot.com/2016/03/re-where-we-turned-wrong-way.html
You discuss how the US government recently aggressively protected Apple's and others' intellectual property rights against foreign encroachment, under Fostering An Indigenous Sector...this I tend to doubt, having studied prior US trade policy in this area and others.
Further, neither the state, nor the private sector itself, has any interest in fostering an indigenous IT sector strictly within the territorial and national political confines of the US, and benefiting mainly only US taxpayers.
The history, throughout the 20th Century, shows, to the contrary, that the US has seldom placed domestic economic and commercial interests above foreign policy and so called strategic interests.
Your critique of the idol of entrepreneurship is a bright spot in the narrative. It is always great to explode false myths where one can see them.
Figure 13, great stuff!
http://ineteconomics.org/ideas-papers/blog/what-the-steve-jobs-movie-wont-tell-you-about-apples-success
I wouldn't let a billionaire American entrepreneur take out my garbage, not because he couldn't do it, but because I couldn't trust him.
One should not expect Trump to do anything like what he says on trade, perhaps even things you think you support, even if he happens to actually believe it and wants to.
He can't: political structural problems hardly touched on in your book....
All the best
Boomerbuster
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