The U.S. shed factories and the skills around them, while China accepted inefficiency to build complete industrial systems and long-term manufacturing power.
In their August 19, 2025 Foreign Affairs article, “The Real China Model: Beijing’s Enduring Formula for Wealth and Power,” Dan Wang and Arthur Kroeber challenge a set of simplified and reassuring beliefs that long shaped Western interpretations of China’s rise. What they call “The Real China Model” is not a new doctrine but a corrective: … Read more
In her December 2025 New Year address, Huawei Rotating Chairwoman Meng Wanzhou (Sabrina Meng) framed the company’s recent trajectory as a deliberate strategic reorientation. Reviewing Huawei’s resilient performance in 2025 across 5G-Advanced, HarmonyOS, intelligent driving, AI computing, and digital energy, she outlined seven priority arenas for 2026 that mark a shift from broad-based technological expansion … 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
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
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