How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late
The article How to Make an American Job Before It’s Too Late is written by Andy Grove. He is one of the founders of and a long time CEO and Chairman of Intel. You may know Intel as the maker of 80% of the computer central processing units in the world. You may recognize the acronym CPU or the model name Pentium.
He is concerned with the deindustrialization of the US economy and the consequent loss of innovation in this country.
He puts the details and authority around some of the trends that I have been worried about for many years.
Our fundamental economic beliefs, which we have elevated from a conviction based on observation to an unquestioned truism, is that the free market is the best economic system — the freer, the better. Our generation has seen the decisive victory of free-market principles over planned economies. So we stick with this belief, largely oblivious to emerging evidence that while free markets beat planned economies, there may be room for a modification that is even better.
He starts to indicate what modifications are needed when he says:
The rapid development of the Asian economies provides numerous illustrations. In a thorough study of the industrial development of East Asia, Robert Wade of the London School of Economics found that these economies turned in precedent- shattering economic performances over the 1970s and 1980s in large part because of the effective involvement of the government in targeting the growth of manufacturing industries.
You may think that he is just too naive to understand the perils of a planned economy. See if this history of his changes your mind:
I fled Hungary as a young man in 1956 to come to the U.S. Growing up in the Soviet bloc, I witnessed first-hand the perils of both government overreach and a stratified population. Most Americans probably aren’t aware that there was a time in this country when tanks and cavalry were massed on Pennsylvania Avenue to chase away the unemployed. It was 1932; thousands of jobless veterans were demonstrating outside the White House. Soldiers with fixed bayonets and live ammunition moved in on them, and herded them away from the White House. In America! Unemployment is corrosive. If what I’m suggesting sounds protectionist, so be it.
Ayn Rand apparently had a similar history with planned economies in her youth. When she came to this country, she never went through the experience of building a multi-billion dollar high tech company. She didn’t have the opportunity to learn that her obsession over the evils of a planned economy would lead her to to an extreme obsession with unfettered capitalism that is almost equally as perilous.
