The U.S. economy is doing better than anywhere else in the world — yet somehow the Biden Administration’s role in making that happen doesn’t seem to be getting much traction with the press or in the polls. Yet what is going on is a huge paradigm shift that’s taking place under the radar. Where is this coming from?
Back on June 14, 2024, Farah Stockman ran a profile piece on Jennifer M. Harris in The NY Times. If you’ve never heard of Harris, it’s time to take a look. A 2016 description of her career for a talk on a book she co-authored “WAR BY OTHER MEANS: GEOECONOMICS AND STATECRAFT” gives some idea of her bona fides:
Jennifer M. Harris is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Prior to joining the Council, Harris was a member of the Policy Planning Staff (PPS) at the U.S. Department of State responsible for global markets, geo-economic issues and energy security. In that role, Harris was a lead architect of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's Economic Statecraft agenda, which launched in 2011. Before joining the State Department, Harris served on the staff of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, covering a range of economic and financial issues.
Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Foreign Affairs, the Washington Quarterly, and the World Economic Forum among other outlets. A Truman and a Rhodes scholar, she holds degrees in economics and international relations from Wake Forest University (BA) and Oxford University (MPhil), and a JD from Yale Law School. Harris is the author of War By Other Means: Geoeconomics and Statecraft (Harvard University Press, April 2016), co-authored with Robert Blackwill, which argues that the United States too often reaches for the gun over the purse to advance its interests abroad.
Harris has not let the grass grow under her feet since then; Stockman’s 2024 commentary “The Queen Bee of Bidenomics” in The NY Times discusses how her ideas have influenced the Biden administration on economic policy. (Gift Link for full access)
...I spent much of the Trump administration following steelworkers in Indiana who lost their jobs when their factory moved to Mexico. They felt betrayed by elites, and they weren’t wrong. I was thrilled when the Biden administration came in with a plan for big federal investments in the American industrial base, tariffs, support for labor unions and actions against monopolies. No one knew what to call it — postneoliberalism? Democratic capitalism? Neopopulism? — but for the first time in generations a U.S. administration was saying that people should control the market, not the other way around. I believed in it. But if it was the right path, why didn’t more voters trust President Biden on the economy?
To understand who Ms. Harris is, you have to know who she used to be. As a young State Department policy planner in the 2000s, she was a lonely voice in Washington raising the alarm about the rise of China. She pushed for tariffs and against trade agreements before it was cool, and was an author of a book called “War by Other Means” about how blind faith in free markets put the United States at a geopolitical disadvantage. For years, she felt like an oddball in Washington, where both parties were still in thrall to neoliberalism.
emphasis added
Neoliberalism is a bit amorphous; the wikipedia entry shows how it has transmogrified over time. Its latest iteration, a belief that deregulation, free trade, and market forces will lead to economic prosperity for the vast majority of people, has not worked out so well.
As Stockman describes it, the end result has been things like massive inequality benefitting the 1% at the expense of everyone else, jobs shipped overseas to China, and the 2008 financial crisis that saw Wall Street bailed out while Main Street was left twisting in the wind. It has come to be seen as the underlying belief system that stoked the economic discontent in America that Trump seized upon.
Nonetheless the Powers That Be among the media, the corporate monopolies, the oligarchs — the winners in other words — remain largely committed to it. That is why Bidenomics gets so little credit and a lot of pushback, even though the U.S. is seeing consistent job growth and economic strength unmatched by the rest of the world. It’s a fundamentally different approach which rejects the free market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman and his followers.
A 2020 article by Harris along with Jake Sullivan in Foreign Policy called for a reappraisal of the principles that should be guiding economic policy and the consequences for foreign policies based on them.
...Today, moderate domestic policy experts are experiencing a genuine reckoning as they accept that economists got a number of things wrong and significant correctives are overdue. This has produced a marked shift in the debate on issues including worker power, the taxation of capital, anti-monopoly policy, and the scope of public investment. While foreign-policy hands have started to focus more on what it will take to enhance U.S. competitiveness, they haven’t had the same kind of basic reckoning. The time has come for foreign-policy professionals to develop a sharper and more systematic sense of what needs to change in their own economic assumptions, both domestic and international.
emphasis added
Read the whole thing — it gives a more detailed explanation of what Harris is calling for than is laid out in Stockman’s profile. Stockman does give some idea though of just how important Harris has been to the Biden administration:
...Her work at Hewlett was just getting off the ground in 2020 when Mr. Biden won. Ms. Harris couldn’t resist the chance to join the administration. “It felt like the ‘Nerd Justice League’ was assembling,” she told me. “And I had some FOMO.”
As an adviser on international economic policy, Ms. Harris had a hand in everything from making the case for industrial policy to designing a new framework for trade. This time, she wasn’t a lonely voice. Numerous grantees or partners from the Hewlett initiative entered the administration as well: Heather Boushey, an expert on equitable growth, became a member of Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers; K. Sabeel Rahman, a scholar of antitrust law, became head of regulatory affairs; and his collaborator Lina Khan became chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
President Joe Biden is often criticized from the left as being years out of date on his views, as not being progressive enough — yet his administration is in the process of fundamentally reshaping the role of government in managing the economy and who it benefits. It’s a rejection of decades of blind worship of free markets in the belief they would magically deliver optimum results for everyone — the Invisible Hand Of The Free Market. It’s no wonder those who have benefitted from neoliberalism are throwing their money at Trump, who is promising more tax cuts for the rich.
The press has largely never been good at communicating economic policy ideas to the general public — especially since they can be hard to distill into soundbites. High interest rates and lingering disruption from the pandemic are occupying the attention of many, obscuring the impact Bidenomics has been having. Turning around decades of failed policies is hard — momentum is shifting but it will take time for these fundamental changes to be realized.
A second Trump term is likely to wreck the economy and cause disruption on a global scale — and that’s without considering the assault on democracy that would occur. That polls show people think the economy would be better under Trump is evidence that there is something seriously wrong out there. It’s also possible to wonder if Harris and her ideas haven’t gotten more attention because she’s a woman.
There’s plenty of concern about a second Trump administration and what it would do to democracy in America. We should also be concerned with what Trump’s random economic obsessions and tax cuts would do, along with the abandonment of needed public investment in the country for so many things, from the social safety net, to infrastructure, to climate.
We’re not just voting whether or not we will keep democracy in this country; we’re voting on what kind of economy we will have and who it will serve. This is a story that needs wider coverage.
UPDATE 6-26-2024 1500hrs:
Digby links to a report on Nobel prize winning economists, and their view of what Trump’s economic policies would do.
A bunch of Nobel prize winning economists have some thoughts on Trump’s “economic proposals”
Sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists signed a joint letter Tuesday warning of what they see as economic risks if former President Donald Trump were to serve a second term, including reheated inflation.
“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we all agree that Joe Biden’s economic agenda is vastly superior to Donald Trump’s,” the economists wrote. Axios was first to report the letter….