A few economists are starting to think seriously about industrial policy

But not enough researchers are paying attention, and we only know a little so far.

One of my biggest problems with the discipline of economics is how fundamentally reactive it is. Economists tend to study whatever topics are big in the news right now — in the 70s everyone was writing about inflation, in 2009 everyone was scrambling to write papers about how financial crashes could bring down an economy, and so on. Only a few economists tend to have the vision to write about important issues well in advance of when they explode into the mainstream consciousness, and these tend to win Nobel prizes. If you want to be one of the economists who gets out in front of the crowd,…

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