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Showing posts with the label industrial policy

U.S. anti-competitiveness

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The NY Times has an article up about the iPhone jobs ending up in China .  It (i think) is supposed to be about how they are more flexible, faster, etc.  except that I read it as being behavior that we explicitly don't want.  Choice quotes When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.  To me, this sounds like exactly the kind of behavior that we rail against - we don't want our government subsidizing our industries, picking winners/losers, etc.  do we...