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.
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
In the United States, the growing prevalence of ALICE households—asset-limited, income-constrained, and employed—represents not merely a social welfare challenge but a structural failure in talent mobilization. High living costs, pervasive legal and regulatory risk, and an expensive failure environment constrain individuals’ ability to pursue technical training, tolerate career risk, or sustain long time horizons. These … Read more
“Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed” (ALICE) describes U.S. households that earn above the Federal Poverty Level yet lack the resources necessary for economic security. ALICE is neither a conspiracy nor a moral failure; it is a rational outcome of interacting systems optimized for self-protection in a society that has lost its stabilizers. U.S. over-financialization and … Read more
Engineering capability—the ability to transform theoretical and technological innovations into practical products—has long been a cornerstone of national competitiveness. The United States, once a global leader in this domain, has experienced a gradual decline due to a complex interplay of factors: overdevelopment of the service and financial sectors leading to industrial hollowing out, globalization and … Read more