Examples of the developmental state are familiar in East Asia: Japan and the four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore), plus post-Mao China. But the East Asians borrowed the developmentalist model from Germany and the United States, which in their successful attempts to catch up with industrial Britain in the 19th century had used their own variants of the tradition, associated with Friedrich List in Germany and Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clay in the U.S. The roots of developmentalist economics can be traced back to mercantilism and cameralism in early modern Europe and even further back to Renaissance Italy. (There was no “fascist model” of economics. Mussolini’s regime might be classified as an authoritarian developmentalist state, but the short-lived Nazi economy was based first on preparation for war and then on plunder and slavery.) Ironically, during the Cold War, when the U.S. supposedly illustrated the virtues of free enterprise, the U.S. had its own successful developmental-state industrial policy, orchestrated by the Defense Department through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and other agencies. In the 1990s, libertarians and neoliberals claimed that the information technology revolution proved the superiority of the free market to government when it comes to innovation. But the major tools of the computer age, from digitization to the global internet to the computer mouse were developed by government contractors reliant on U.S. taxpayer money. It is no coincidence that U.S. productivity and innovation sputtered in this century, when neoliberal Democrats and libertarian Republicans decided to let the free market develop the next wave of technologies. It turns out that venture capitalists and advertisers are more interested in addictive online sites like Facebook and Twitter than in robots and cures for cancer. Without exception the major advances in basic technology during the post-1980s era of free market utopianism have been largely funded by the federal government.
Michael Lind, “Cold War II” (January 3rd 2023).
