The US presidency's economical agenda should enhance the well-being of all citizens and strengthen national security. Are these assumptions better suited to the announcements Kamali Harriswhether Donald Trump? In late October, together with 22 winners of the Alfred Nobel Prize in Economics, I signed open letter, which gives the answer: only Harris has a coherent plan, including developmental incentives for science, facilitating the commercialisation of fresh inventions and financing of emerging companies across the country.
Trump, though claiming the right to talk on behalf of those who feel left behind by globalisation, promises above all significant increase in customs duties – which will hamper advancement and hinder the creation of good fresh jobs. In modern times, extremist protectionism was repeatedly tried, and all time these attempts brought disappointment, as well as destructive retaliation from abroad to the economy.
If Trump wins the election and keeps his word, the drastic increase in tariffs will consequence in an equally sharp increase in consumer goods prices, which are purchased by low-income people, including many of his constituents. At best, Trump's announcements are empty. However, anyone who sits in the White home has the power to launch a global Trade wars with countries in Europe and another continents that have so far been trusted US trading partners. The consequences of specified a war would be lamented and for the general well-being, and for security.
In the ninth chapter of the programme A fresh Way Forward for the mediate Class Harris and Walz's run presents a imagination of creating fresh jobs through technology development. The main aim is to support investments in a number of state-of-the-art technologies, including "bioproduction, artificial intelligence, aeronautics, data centres and clean energy", while at the same time encouraging conventional sectors of the economy, specified as steel industry, to modernise.
If the United States does not lead the improvement of these technologies, another countries will take our place. Since in the foreseeable future the largest rival of the USA in the field of technology will most likely be China – whose power is not always friendly to us – there is nothing more crucial from the point of view of the US national interest than dominance in the field of inventiveness.
The Harris and Walza plan focuses on supporting investment in manufacturing across the country, including where “there have long been communities active in manufacturing, agriculture or energy production”. It's a most realistic vision. How Jonathan Gruber and I wrote in 2019 in a book Jump-Starting America, throughout the United States there are rich resources of unused method talent – as well as many places where new, good jobs are urgently needed. The best way to make specified jobs is to turn fresh ideas into fresh businesses and keep as much employment as possible where something fresh is actually being created.
As regards artificial intelligence, Harris and Walz have the right approach: to make and grow the National Artificial Intelligence investigation Resource (NAIRR) so that tools based on it become available to a wider group of users. Today, the marketplace favours those uses of artificial intelligence that increase the productivity of highly educated people. However, there is simply a real anticipation of developing AI pro-working, which will increase the productivity and pay of all employees, including those without a university diploma.
However, specified an approach requires vision, resources and investment, as well as an appropriate catalyst. Act CHIPS and discipline Act and taxation facilitations contained in the Act Inflation simplification ActThe Biden-Harris administration has shown that it knows how to stimulate investment in modern technologies and manufacturing.
Donald Trump, however, powerfully insists on imposing duties, which reminds us Import substitution policywhich in the last 50 years has failed to implement many Latin American countries. The same rule is always behind this approach: a barrier in the form of prohibitive duties will defend the national industry, resulting in an increase in employment or higher wages (or possibly even both).
Mexico, Argentina and Brazil have tried this – and all these countries cast the same policy: duties, alternatively of supporting investment and development, let well-established companies to sit on their laurels. Companies freed from competition do not feel force to make or increase employment. Moreover, specified protectionism is frequently accompanied by another policies that petriate the industrial structures. A fewer billionaires can gain even more, but most people are not doing well in specified a regime.
Trump's top threat is democracy. We know this due to the fact that we remember that he refused to admit his defeat in the 2020 election, and his supporters encouraged the attack on Congress. The undermining of democratic institutions is not only a dangerous abuse of power – it is besides a direct attack on the basis of American prosperity.
Democratic countries must supply collective prosperity, due to the fact that erstwhile they neglect to do so, there is widespread frustration and disillusionment with democracy, and political polarization is increasing rapidly. There is no uncertainty that in fresh decades the prosperity of the mediate class has been seriously impaired – together with Daron Acemoğlu We compose about it in a fresh book Power and Progress. However, the consequence to these problems cannot be an effort to "freeze" manufacture and jobs in their current state. At best, it'll be in vain.
America should be doing what it has long been truly good at: inventing the future, creating highly paid jobs (for people at all level of education), and thus selling goods and services to the world. This will not be possible without strong democracy, strong support for innovation and a government supporting occupation creation across the country.
Kamali Harris' program contains all these elements. Trump only offers discredited protectionism, which can bring wealth to the few, and complaints from all others will should be silenced.
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Simon Johnson – erstwhile chief economist of the global Monetary Fund, lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Together with Daron Acemoğlu and James A. Robinson, he received the Alfred Nobel Prize of the Bank of Sweden in economical Sciences in 2024. Co-author (with Daron Acemoğlu) of the book Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year conflict Over Technology and Prosperity (PublicAffairs, 2023).
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Copyright: task Syndicate, 2024. www.project-syncicate.org. He translated Marek Jedliński from English.
