The U.S. is losing the international competition for good jobs and high-value industries. Industrial policy is the missing solution.
​Industrial policy is the strategic support of specific industries, the heart of the productive economy, with tariffs, federal technology research, and currency reform.
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But Washington still mostly believes trade should be free, the dollar should float, and that innovation comes from the private sector.
This book makes a bold case that such laissez-faire has failed and that proactive industrial policy is the only way for America to remain prosperous and secure.
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Trump and Biden have enacted some elements, but America now needs something systematic and comprehensive, including more tariffs, a competitive
exchange rate, and federal support for the commercialization, not just invention, of new technologies.
Timely, meticulously researched, and bipartisan, this book replaces misunderstandings about industrial policy with lucid explanations of its underlying economic theory, the tools that implement it, and its successes (and failures) in America and abroad.
This book examines key industries of the past and future – steel, automobiles, television, semiconductors, space, aviation, robotics, and nanotechnology. It concludes with a realistic, actionable policy roadmap.
Marc Fasteau
is a vice-chair of the Coalition for a Prosperous America. Before founding an insurance company acquired by Progressive, he was a partner at Dillon Read & Co., a New York investment bank, and previously a congressional economic staffer. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was on the Law Review. He lives in New York City.
Ian Fletcher
is on CPA’s Advisory Board. He is the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work and coauthor of The Conservative Case against Free Trade. He has been senior economist at the Coalition, a research fellow at the US Business and Industry Council, an economist in private practice, and an IT consultant. He was educated at Columbia University and the University of Chicago. He lives in San Francisco.
