China’s state sets goals, takes risks, and builds scale, while firms compete and innovate—an integrated system the market-driven U.S. struggles to match.
In her December 2025 New Year address, Huawei Rotating Chairwoman Meng Wanzhou (Sabrina Meng) reviewed the company’s major achievements in 2025 and outlined seven primary arenas for development in 2026. The speech signaled a clear strategic shift from broad-based technological expansion toward focused ecosystem building and a more explicit role as an industrial enabler. This … Read more
ALICE—Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed—refers to households that are working yet lack sufficient savings and financial buffers, leaving them highly vulnerable to shocks such as illness, job loss, or family disruption. The concept centers not on income alone, but on exposure to financial risk and the capacity to absorb unexpected setbacks. Understanding ALICE therefore requires … Read more
Living costs in the United States are exceptionally high not because Americans consume more, but because the price of everyday services is structurally elevated. In sectors such as healthcare, education, childcare, home repair, legal services, and even food delivery, prices far exceed global norms. These costs are driven by a combination of mechanisms: Baumol’s cost … Read more
China defies long-held Western assumptions about modernity by actively defining its own path rather than opposing the West with a universal alternative. Its experience demonstrates that modernity is not singular but plural: distinct historical, cultural, and institutional trajectories can also yield prosperity, stability, and technological advancement. The Western difficulty, therefore, extends beyond political disagreement to … Read more
For much of the post–Cold War era, the United States treated a set of interlocking doctrines—market fundamentalism, free-trade universalism, post-industrial optimism, asset-light corporate governance, financialization, limited-government absolutism, unfettered capital mobility, consumer-welfare reductionism, and the peace-through-trade assumption—not as historically contingent choices but as permanent economic truths. In combination, these ideas proved costly. They privileged short-term efficiency … Read more
China’s industrial success stems from treating manufacturing not as a byproduct of market forces, but as a core national security and development objective. The state protected and sequenced openness, conditioned foreign investment, and prioritized asset-heavy ownership, scale, and export discipline over short-term profitability. Capital was deliberately directed into factories, supply chains, and physical technologies—particularly autos, … Read more
After 1991, the central error of U.S. economic statecraft was not adherence to any single doctrine—market fundamentalism, free-trade universalism, or neoliberal reform—but the deeper meta-error of treating those doctrines as natural laws rather than contingent tools. The absence of a peer rival was mistaken for the end of competition; a fleeting unipolar moment was misread … Read more
After the Cold War, the United States elevated a cluster of post-1991 doctrines—market fundamentalism, free-trade universalism, end-of-history liberalism, anti-industrial and asset-light biases, financialization as progress, limited-government absolutism, global capital mobility, consumer-welfare reductionism, and the assumption of peace through trade—into something approaching natural law. The meta-error was not any single ideology, but the belief that these … Read more
In December 2025, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin delivered unusually blunt testimony to Congress, warning that the current U.S. Artemis lunar landing architecture is technically unsustainable. His remarks were not a product of factional infighting or rhetorical pessimism, but a rare whistleblower-style intervention from a senior insider with deep engineering credentials. Griffin’s warning underscored a … Read more
Within U.S. politics, a longstanding divide has existed between progressive leaders who emphasize distributional policy—welfare, equality, and redistribution—and those who argue that economic growth itself must remain a central objective. Critics and supporters of Abundance (Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, 2025) converge on a key claim: without robust growth and sustained supply expansion, redistribution alone … Read more