Category Archives: Uncategorized

Protectionism Is (Almost) Mainstream

Lighthizer, Robert. No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America’s Workers: New York: Broadside Books, 2023. ==== “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” Often attributed to John Maynard Keynes, … Continue reading

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The East Asian miracle: a note

East Asia’s economic  policymakers have identified the manufacture of advanced intermediate goods as the key to economic leadership.  Such goods include the highly purified materials, the precisely engineered  components and the state-of-the-art production machines needed by  other nations to make the world’s consumer goods.   The special  significance of advanced intermediate … Continue reading

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The Myth of Post-industrialism

By Eamonn Fingleton America’s shuttered factories and the false hope of post-industrialism. (This article first appeared in the November-December 2022 issue of The American Conservative.) In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American nation … Continue reading

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America’s Shuttered Factories and the False Hope of Post-Industrialism

Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell convinced America that manufacturing didn’t matter. He was wrong. By Eamonn Fingleton In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. Navy doubled its fleet within a year and quadrupled it before … Continue reading

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The rise of East Asia and an epochal threat to American freedoms

By Eamonn Fingleton (This article appears in the January-February 2022 issue of The American Conservative. To read it in pdf form,  please click here.) In April 1998 Sony Corporation chairman Norio Ohga made world headlines with this comment: “The Japanese economy … Continue reading

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On VJ Day, a hard look at an atom bomb apologist

By Eamonn Fingleton If you Google “Laurens van der Post” and “Hiroshima”, you’ll turn up hundreds of thousands of results. This confirms something that some observers have known for years: that though the South African-born author Laurens van der Post … Continue reading

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Was the Hiroshima bomb justified?

By Eamonn Fingleton It is a question that comes up every year: was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima justified? This year — the 75th anniversary of the attack — the question seems more pertinent than ever. The bombing, which took … Continue reading

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Beyond free trade

Meet the heterodox economists challenging globalism. (This article was first published in the April 2011 issue of the American Conservative.) “I don’t care who writes a nation’s laws, or crafts its advanced treatises, if I can write its economics textbooks.” … Continue reading

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The Fingleton invitation: some reaction

It turns out — surprise — that not everyone thinks the Japanese economy is a basket case. A few days ago I issued an invitation to ten top Japan watchers to a debate on what has really happened to the … Continue reading

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