How to fill the gaps in the U.S. economy
W hat do the internet, nuclear power, GPS, cloud computing, voice recognition and artificial intelligence all have in common? They were all developed with the help of the U.S. government. As economist Mariana Mazzucato and others have documented, government-led research efforts have been crucial to breakthroughs in a number of key technologies that later yielded big dividends for American industry.
Many of these advances have come through a single agency — the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA (also known as ARPA at some points in its history). In a recent essay, economists Pierre Azoulay, Erica Fuchs, Anna Goldstein and Michael Kearney explain the organizational model that makes DARPA unique. DARPA first selects an area of technology that the private sector hasn’t made a lot of progress in yet, for example, brain-computer interface, or drone submarines, then finds researchers who are working on ideas that might fill that void.
But despite this record of success in technology, the U.S. government has no equivalent agency that deals with economic challenges. Just as DARPA has exploited areas where the private sector needed some assistance, a U.S. office of industrial policy might be able to fill many of the economic gaps that are holding the economy back from its full potential.
Economists such as Dani Rodrik, Nathan Lane and Ernest Liu, and writers such as Joe Studwell, have articulated various theories of how industrial policy can help poor countries develop. But industrial policy in the rich world, where many highly efficient companies and advanced industries already exist, and where many regions are already thriving, should probably look very different. Instead of focusing on reshaping the economy as a whole, a U.S. office of industrial policy would focus on relatively cheap, high-impact projects aimed at filling in the holes.
One big gap involves declining regions. Across the U.S., but especially in the Upper Midwest, there are cities and towns that have been hit hard by the Rust Belt deindustrialization of the 1980s, the China shock of the 2000s and the Great Recession of 2008, or some combination of the three. As writers James and Deborah Fallows have documented, some of these places are doing a good job pulling themselves out of their slump, and the strategies they use often look similar — cultivating public-private partnerships, leveraging nearby universities, developing new local tent-pole industries and revitalizing their downtowns.
A U.S. office of industrial policy could systematically compile and analyze information on local strategies that worked, and synthesize these into a standard plan that could be distributed to business, political and academic leaders in less successful towns.
A second big gap involves exporting. The U.S. now exports relatively little relative to the size of its economy. The likely reason is that the U.S. is such a large home market that many American companies simply don’t bother to sell overseas. But there is evidence that, once companies do make the leap and decide to compete in world markets, their productivity goes up. A U.S. office of industrial policy could help domestically focused companies start exporting by providing them with information and non-cash assistance, marketing, financing and logistical support.