A strong, vibrant manufacturing sector is critical to the future prosperity of the United States and its workers. The authors provide enormous background, case studies, and analysis about how to implement strong trade and industrial policies to restore America’s leadership in innovation and manufacturing – and the good jobs that come with it. Even the most controversial policy recommendations are worthy of review and consideration, no matter your position on trade policies. This should be required reading for any policymaker working to increase America’s productive capacity and strengthen our supply chains.

America needs a new economic consensus to overthrow decades of industrial decline and subservience to Communist China. This book lays the intellectual groundwork for that consensus—one that would make for a stronger, more prosperous nation. It couldn’t come at a better time.

Truly impressive. While readers may disagree with some of its recommendations, almost all will find its documentation of the practice over the last three centuries a source of valuable historical perspective. And its assessments of past successes and failures – overseas and in the US – will be helpful to policymakers in a world where industrial policy is likely to become de rigueur.

This book understands what many in our national security establishment do not: America cannot have a strong national defense without both a strong military industrial base and a strong civilian industrial base behind it. Even better, it lays out the policies we will need, going forward, to achieve the latter. It truly convinced me that free markets just aren't enough anymore.

An indispensable guide for CEOs for understanding and taking full advantage of America’s return to industrial policy. The book convincingly rebuts the “leave everything to the market” argument against industrial policy and quantifies the horrific damage done to our businesses, workers, and national security by our decades-long pursuit of the free trade mirage. Its comprehensive, well-thought-out, and coherent set of policy recommendations should be required reading for every policymaker in Washington.

In this remarkable and comprehensive book, Fasteau and Fletcher provide a theoretical, historical and up-to-date review of industrial policies, in the US and elsewhere, as well as a decent summary of the main Biden initiatives: the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act, as of late 2023. Their goal is to justify, defend, and to extend the case for industrial policies, which they do with admirably fair attention to unsuccessful past cases.

There has been a global trend of policymakers drifting away from laissez faire and free trade, because of various reasons. And that story has not been explained rigorously enough by most books and research papers that exist today. This in-depth treatise on industrial policy fills in this huge gap in a scintillating manner with references and explanations from across the world. The book provides the readers with the intellectual ammunition needed to contrast and compare various policy pathways and their potential impact on industries.

State ownership and control of industry have failed, as has leaving everything to the market. Instead, governments need judicious and evidencebased industrial policies. This book makes a brilliant case for the same, combining strategic guidance by the state with the innovative potential of competitive enterprise. Everyone who cares about our economic future should read this.

If America and its democratic allies are to recover the economic and strategic bulk lost over the last four decades, elected officials and policymakers will need a plan. No longer can they blindly put their hopes in the abstractions of free-market ideology. They must have industrial policy tethered to the reality of strategic competition. Our strategic rivals are embracing industrial policy to our detriment; we must respond. This excellent book lights the way ahead.

This book explores the profound effects of America’s failure to embark on sound industrial policies and how these could evolve. Importantly, it makes a real contribution in pulling together the economic side of industrial policy: the need to pull together manufacturing promotion, trade, and exchange rate policies.

As questions about technological competitiveness and the accelerating loss of good jobs press themselves ever more intensely to the front of public debate, industrial policy looms as a nearly inescapable imperative for US policy makers. This extremely timely book is the most thorough historical and comparative examination of industrial policy practice and variants across the advanced political economies. No informed discussion of our industrial options in the US moving forward should proceed without familiarity with the arguments in this book.

Without a doubt this is the most definitive analysis of industrial policy ever written. For anyone interested in industrial policy and its implications for the economy, this is the perfect source and a real triumph!

Research, discussion, and policy initiatives advocating industrial policy for the US are spreading in the wake of the failure of neoliberal doctrines to deliver inclusive growth and technological leadership. Fasteau and Fletcher’s seminal contribution advances this agenda and paves the way for a proactive commonsensical set of industrial policies.

A well-written, well-reasoned, and remarkably thorough case for a much more vigorous and targeted industrial policy. It correctly argues that markets alone will not optimize output from the most valuable industries because of significant market failures. Its detailed, well-articulated proposal for a specific “industrial policy for the United States” should give free-market acolytes pause and progressives ammunition in the battle for an industrial revival.

The topic of industrial policy has surged back onto the American political scene so quickly that most policymakers find themselves scrambling to educate themselves and thirsty for relevant expertise. Industrial Policy for the United States should be their authoritative resource. And unlike most such resources, occasionally thumbed through in search of a particular statistic or quote, this book will be found sitting open on many of the Washington desks at which the decisions get made.

The authors demolish the illusion that our post–WWII economic dominance was the result of the private sector on its own developing and commercializing technologies from the underlying science. They address the need for a multipronged growth policy targeting a portfolio of high technologies with a market focus. They rightly advocate investment in R&D, capital formation, labor upskilling, and technological infrastructure, and address the quasi-public-good nature of much of this investment, necessitating a combined government–industry approach. Although recent legislation offers hope for such reforms, the jury is still out, making this book very timely.

So much economic analysis and controversy misses the real heart of our current crisis – America’s industries, especially manufacturing, and why they keep losing ground to foreign competitors. This book finally gives a complete picture of what went wrong and what we can do about it. I especially appreciated the discussion of how the development and deployment of innovations depend on not only the private sector, but also on crucial, underappreciated programs like the Manufacturing Extension Partnership and Manufacturing USA. If American industry is to convincingly recover its formerly world-leading position, this country will need to support every step of the innovation pipeline, not just pure science and defense-oriented technologies, across the entire industrial spectrum.

Fasteau and Fletcher have assembled an extraordinarily comprehensive work on industrial history and strategy. It should be a must-read for policymakers. It is an impressive and insightful exploration and analysis of not just America’s industrial past, present, and future, but of how its competencies compare to the rest of the world. Moreover, the authors have compiled such a tremendous amount of data in making their case that this book will serve as an essential go-to reference book for years to come.

This book illuminates the path through the complexities and escalating costs of industry and advanced manufacturing, where current US policy is insufficient. Presenting a detailed plan and advocating for a whole-of-government industrial policy, it offers essential guidance for students and policymakers to navigate and shape the future of American industry.

As compared with many such lists of recommendations in this arena, it is relatively specific about who should do what with what resources. Many studies and reports omit these absolutely central elements, so this is a strength of your book... I didn’t see any recommendations that I would disagree with.

This pioneering study represents the first serious and comprehensive work on American industrial policy. For the first time, policy makers, political leaders, academics and industrialists have a roadmap for delivering measures that will reverse U.S. industrial decline and put the nation back on the path to global economic leadership for generations to come.

The fight to control tomorrow’s strategic industries will not be determined by market forces but by industrial policy. This superb and timely book explains why and how America must act if it is to be a major player in the world’s industrial future.

This book turns an opinion not widely held not so long ago into a statement of the obvious through the logic inherent in the wealth of facts it deploys. Its powerful argument for America to adopt a coherent industrial policy is driven home by cataloguing the deleterious impact unbridled globalized free trade has had on the US economy and chronicling the successes (and failures) in this field of America’s competitors. Fasteau and Fletcher have managed to cram more common sense into one book than any author since Tom Paine.

A major cause of declining wages of non-elite workers over the past decades has been the deindustrialization of America. In this remarkable volume Fasteau and Fletcher present a powerful case for coherent industrial policy that can reverse this disturbing trend. They discuss in detail both successful and unsuccessful past experiences of governments implementing industrial policy worldwide, and how industrial policy should be implemented in practice. Anybody who worries about where America is heading needs to read this book.

As an advocate for the recovery of our industrial sectors, it has been an ongoing and frustrating battle getting economists off the worn-out mantra of global free trade being the only solution even when the failed outcome is obvious. But now we have an economist who in this book, and others he has written, not only sets the scene to clearly dispel the myth of free trade, but defines the detailed recovery manual that the governments and industrialists of the Western world will need to get together to rebuild our ailing prosperity.