Halten Sie sich an die Regeln

*What would you want to tell the next U.S. president? FP asked nine thinkers, including Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at Columbia University, to write a letter with their advice:*

“Dear Madam or Mr. President,

The United States has in recent years made a major U-turn.

After decades of telling other countries that they should not undertake industrial policies, our country under President Joe Biden enacted two massive bills: the Chips and Science Act, to promote U.S. production of a crucial component of any 21st-century economy; and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which, in spite of its name, was really about the country beginning its green transition and capturing, for itself, more green jobs. The scale of the acts is enormous—for Chips and Science, some quarter of a trillion dollars, and the IRA, originally estimated at one-third of a trillion dollars, is now thought to be in the order of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. The acts are having one desired effect: The called-for investments seem to be occurring, in some cases on a very large scale…”

You can’t play by the rules when others don’t. You can’t cuff yourself when others won’t. In geopolitics, turnabout is fair play. The US’s problem wasn’t that it didn’t cuff itself enough, but that it let others get away with things without a turnabout.