Author: Ramsi Woodcock

Categories
Antitrust Civilization Monopolization

Nietzsche on Competition and Monopoly

When the traveler Pausanias visited the Helicon on his travels through Greece, an ancient copy of the Greeks’ first didactic poem, Hesiod’s Works and Days, was shown to him, inscribed on lead plates and badly damaged by time and weather. [I]t . . . began straight with the assertion: ‘there are two Eris-goddesses on earth’. This is one of the most remarkable of Hellenic ideas and deserves to be impressed upon newcomers right at the gate of entry to Hellenic ethics. ‘One should praise the one Eris as much as blame the other, if one has any sense; because the two goddesses have quite separate dispositions. One promotes wicked war and feuding, the cruel thing! No mortal likes her, but the yoke of necessity forces man to honor the heavy burden of this Eris according to the decrees of the Immortals. Black Night gave birth to this one as the older of the two; but Zeus, who reigned on high, placed the other on the roots of the earth and amongst men as a much better one. She drives even the unskilled man to work; and if someone who asked property see someone else who is rich, he likewise hurries off to sow and plant and set his house in order; neighbor competes with neighbor for prosperity. This Eris is good for men. Even potters harbor grudges against potters, carpenters against carpenters, beggars envy beggars and minstrels envy minstrels.’

Hesiod . . . first portrays one Eris as wicked, in fact the one who leads men in hostile struggle-to-the-death, and then praises the other Eris as good who, as jealousy, grudge and envy, goads men to action, not, however, the action of a struggle-to-the-death but the action of competition. The Greek is envious and does not experience this characteristic as a blemish, but as the effect of a benevolent deity . . . . Because he is envious, he feels the envious eye of a God resting on him whenever he has an excessive amount of honor, wealth, fame and fortune, and he fears this envy; in this case, the God warns him of the transitoriness of the human lot, he dreads his good fortune and, sacrificing the best part of it, he prostrates himself before divine envy.

If we want to see that feeling revealed in its naïve form, the feeling that competition is vital, if the well-being of the state is to continue, we should think about the original meaning of ostracism: as, for example, expressed by the Ephesians at the banning of Hermodor. ‘Amongst us, nobody should be the best; but if somebody is, let him be somewhere else, with other people.’ For why should nobody be the best? Because with that, competition would dry up and the permanent basis of life in the Hellenic state would be endangered. . . . The original function of this strange institution is . . . not as a safety valve but as a stimulant: the pre-eminent individual is removed so that a new contest of powers can be awakened: a thought which is hostile to the ‘exclusivity’ of genius in the modern sense, but which assumes that there are always several geniuses to incite each other to action, just as they keep each other within certain limits, to. That is the kernel of the Hellenic idea of competition: it loathes a monopoly of predominance and fears the dangers of this, it desires, as protective measure against genius—a second genius.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Homer on Competition, in On the Genealogy of Morality 187, 189-92 (Keith Ansell-Pearson ed., Carol Diethe trans., 1995).

Three observations. First, Nietzsche’s remark that “[e]ven potters harbor grudges against potters” reminds us that McCloskey ought to have included envy (the second Eris) among the bourgeois virtues, though she did not. In fact, one often senses that the only really human feeling left in the modern world—the only one for which any individual really is capable of killing or dying—is that of envy. Caged, to be sure, hidden, so rarely acknowledged that one would call it subconscious if one did not so often see that knowing look in the eyes of those it is consuming. I suppose in modern guise envy is what Nietzsche elsewhere calls resentment. Which leads to the second observation.

Second, Hellenic potters may have envied Hellenic potters, but what is distinctly un-bourgeois about the Hellenic world, as described by Nietzsche, is this: “[b]ecause he is envious, [the Greek] feels the envious eye of a God resting on him whenever he has an excessive amount of honor, wealth, fame and fortune, and he fears this envy[.]” The modern does not fear God; he believes, instead, that he deserves his wealth, even when he doesn’t have it, which is why envy spoils into resentment in him. Only the successful Greek would ever mistake himself for a God; but even the unsuccessful modern does that.

Third, Nietzsche is a Chicagoan through and through, not an antimonopolist in the contemporary mold. Yes, Nietzsche does ask : “[W]hy should nobody be the best?” And he does answer: “Because [if someone were the best], competition would dry up and the permanent basis of life in the Hellenic state would be endangered[.]” But the reason for which the best must be smashed is not to promote fairness. It is not to make equal.

On the contrary, it is to achieve even greater heights of inequality. As Nietzsche says: “[t]he original function of this strange institution [of smashing the best] is . . . not as a safety valve but as a stimulant: the pre-eminent individual is removed so that a new contest of powers can be awakened[.]” So far from making equal, the purpose of competition is to create “—a second genius.” Thus, in the language of today’s antitrust, Nietzsche’s antimonopolism is dynamic and Schumpeterian. He would smash the best only where the best stand so high above everyone else that they inhibit the process of overcoming and surpassing associated with dynamic competition. The notion that markets should be fair, in the sense that the best should be placed on an equal footing with the rest, plays no role in this calculus.

Are we there yet with the Tech Giants? Is Google already an Alexander—“that grotesquely enlarged reflection of the Hellene,” as Nietzsche calls him in the same essay—raging unchecked across the earth? I suppose that the “kill zone” narrative comes closest to making a genuinely Nietzschean case for breakup: no one will innovate in Google’s markets because Google will win.

But only to the extent that the harm of the kill zone is thought to be the toll it takes on excellence.

Categories
Antitrust Monopolization

Self-Preferencing and the Level Playing Field

I, too, have been enamored of sports metaphors in antitrust. How can the level playing field not convince?

Two wrestlers meet on the floor. If it is uphill for one and downhill for the other, neither will excel. One will find it too easy to win, and so train little. The other will find it too hard to win, and so train little. So, too, in business. If Amazon stands at the top of the hill, because Amazon owns the floor and has chosen to put itself there, then it will do little to improve itself, for it can too easily win against the third-party sellers that it has placed at the bottom of the hill.

But the level playing field is but the pretense of fairness. A way, only, of highlighting a much greater unfairness that we in fact revere. For when the athletes meet, one wins, and not, we like to think, by chance, but because one is better. And why is that one better? Forsooth, because that one does not compete on a level playing field at all. His muscles are better developed. He has better stamina. He is a quicker thinker. He has the focus of mind required to train more. His intuition is better. He has a better spatial sense. And so on. That is, he has an advantage that he does not share with his opponent.

Let us say it is his muscles. In muscle space the field is not level; he stands at the top. And he self-preferences, for he does not, say, starve himself for a week before the bout in order to waste his muscles a bit and thereby level the playing field in muscle space. No! He seizes his advantage. He uses it to win—inevitably to win—and despite this inevitability he feels that he deserves this win, that it is an expression of who he is and not of the tilt of a field.

Why should he feel that his victory is about him given that it was not earned on a truly level playing field? Because it is not a complete leveling that we really seek in any contest. What we seek is to reveal the character of a field that we value. Once we have isolated that field, we glory in whatever tilt we find to it.

If what interests us is who is the strongest, then we want to level the irrelevant fields, and then watch which way the parties slide on the field of strength. If it is the strength of wrestlers, then we level the floor, so that we can better perceive the tilt in their relative strengths.

We can therefore only really object to self-preferencing if the particular instance of self-preferencing at issue relates to a field that we do not think important. We cannot oppose self-preferencing itself, for to do that is to oppose all tilts of field, which is to say, to oppose excellence. It is to insist that no one win the match, or equivalently, that it only ever be determined by a flip of the coin.

(You ask me why the strong massacre the weak in war and want to celebrate it. What challenge is there in that, you say? I say: what challenge was there in your successes, dear reader, any of them, apart from the anxiety you may have felt over whether you would succeed, an anxiety born of your ignorance regarding where your strengths lay? Do you not massacre your opponents too, and call it achievement?)

We can oppose Amazon’s self-preferencing only if it lies in a space that we think irrelevant. If, instead, it reflects a superiority that we desire—if, in the commercial context, it is a superiority in product space, meaning that the self-preferencing delivers better products to consumers—then we must celebrate Amazon’s blood-letting.

We might legitimately say that in giving priority to ads for its own products, Amazon is tilting a field about which we do not care much—the field of marketing—and that prevents the tilt of a different field, that of product quality, from determining the outcome of the game, as we would want it to do.

But we might also conclude that on an ecommerce platform rife with unregulated and unsafe products, the field of information about products should be tilted in favor of Amazon, because then, at least, it is easier for consumers to find the products that Amazon actually stands behind: its own, for which Amazon can be sued if the products turn out to be defective.

So I do not see how the sports metaphor ultimately adds anything to antitrust analysis. It certainly does not teach that the heart of antitrust is fairness, the rules of the game. It merely takes us back to the question that is the heart of all antitrust analysis: does the slaying of competitors improve the product entire, including our ability to find it?

Categories
Antitrust

Cheerledeing

The headline in the New York Times one day last week: “Antitrust Overhaul Passes Its First Tests. Now, the Hard Parts.” The article notes that “[t]he bills face fierce opposition from technology companies, which have marshaled their considerable lobbying operations.” That would have been a good place to mention the fierce support for the bills coming from the Times itself, although I suppose that would be obvious to anyone who had read the article’s headline.

The Washington Post recently called out OAN reporter Christina Bobb for reporting on the Arizona recount while also raising funds to support it. How about an exposé on the Times for cheering on antitrust reforms that target the paper’s own direct competitors—the Tech Giants—for advertising dollars? If the giants go down, the Times will gain.

But I guess the Washington Post will too.

Categories
Civilization Meta Miscellany World

Why Do Mechanical Explanations of the Social Deny Software?

They say that a good social theory must throw out some reality in order to have any explanatory power. Thinkers who favor mechanical explanations of the social—the people who claim that it is climate or asteroids or guns, germs, and steel that explain the rise and fall of civilizations—always seem to throw out the part of the mechanism that is the software. Why?

That is, all mechanistic explanations of the social treat people as machines—robots—that have certain operating limits. They need food and water. They need temperatures that are not too high and not too low. They cannot withstand the slash of a steel weapon. They are susceptible to disease. And so on and all true. These operating limits do constrain what the robots can do. But that is far from all.

Robots need an instruction set to run; they need, in other words, a behavior. And if the dawn of the age of artificial intelligence should be teaching us anything, it is that behavior matters a lot. There is a very big difference between a car, a car that knows to break before hitting something on the highway, and a self-driving car. There is a very big difference between a Rhoomba that moves only in straight lines and one that criss-crosses the room. It would seem to follow that the robots’ software should matter a lot in the rise and fall of civilizations. So why not make social theory by keeping the software and throwing out the robot hardware instead?

Programming in the social is thought, belief, training, worship, prejudice, emotion, philosophy, literature, letters, culture, art. It is the humanities. Humanistic explanations for things—Ruskin’s observation that you can read the decline of a civilization in its art—theorize the social in terms of the human robot’s programming. The humanities throw out the hardware.

(By programming I do not mean that we are necessarily controlled by others. In human beings we are dealing with semi-autonomous, artificially (nay, actually!) intelligent robots. So programming, for us, necessarily means self-programming at both the individual and social levels. Our programs are some peculiar function of inputs from other robots, inputs from the programs of the robots themselves (that is, we use our thought to influence ourselves), and hard-coded inputs (those determined by our genes).)

It is a peculiar thing that at the same moment that, as a technological matter, we are coming to recognize the transformative nature of artificial intelligence in relation to hardware, and indeed at the same moment that, thanks to the great financial success of companies like Google and Facebook, which derives entirely from the value of connecting businesses with individual minds, we are coming to appreciate the great difference influence over minds makes in social outcomes, we should continue to favor mechanical explanations for the social, to attribute the fall of Rome to barbarian invasions rather than decadence, or the rise of China to good policy rather than good spirit.

When we do consider the software, we tend to ignore the most important parts. We credit the power of propaganda, but not the power of religion, ideas, philosophy, love, or, indeed, art. But these too are a part of the programming, and if you judge by the things you yourself hold most dear, likely the most important part.

So do not tell me that talking won’t work. That writing will never change things. That symbolic protest is weak. Or that the only political power grows out of the barrel of a gun—unless you believe that your computer will behave the same no matter what software it runs.

Categories
Meta Miscellany World

If Mars Attacks, It Will Be Us

Maybe the best Martian policy would be to prevent anyone from colonizing Mars, rather than to colonize it first.

Let’s assume for a moment that Mars really can be developed into a self-sufficient Earth 2.0. A big if, of course.

But if true, then see: The New World.

Settlers always have high asabiya, thanks to the challenges they face, and homogeneous interests relative to those who remain in the Old World, with its historic divisions. The Old World always thinks it can control the new, otherwise it wouldn’t foolishly bankroll settlers. But the new is far, far away. It is protected by distance. It is bigger than the territory of any one mother country.

And because it is united—or will become united, because, again, regardless of the origin of the settlers, their interests are always more in common with each other than with those of their mother countries—it can exploit this bounty at scales that no one mother country can ever hope to match.

So, eventually, the new will know its own power and come to dominate the old.

It has, after all, happened before.

And even if we don’t think Mars might be viable, or we think it might be more likely to make a Cuba than a U.S.A., why risk it?

Indeed, colonizing activity by a dominant country is always a self-inflicted wound. Colonization necessarily dilutes the dominant country’s power, because any new territories dilute the power of the earth entire. If I’m two thirds of one and I add one, now I’m one third. The only reason to colonize is to preclude others from doing so; it’s a race to the bottom.

But you can also try to enforce a rule against racing.

And if you were wondering why, in the 15th century, it was the Spaniards who went off looking for new worlds, and not the great powers of the day, not the Ottomans or the Chinese, you have your answer.

Categories
Backwardness of law

Solved: The Problem of Indeterminacy in the Law

It’s not a problem of language. It’s a problem of writing:

Socrates makes the point in Plato’s dialogue [Phaedrus] that writing will not help in the search for truth. He compares writing to painting — paintings look like living beings, but if you ask them a question, they are mute. If you ask written words a question, you get the same answer over and over. Writing cannot distinguish between suitable and unsuitable readers: it can be ill-treated or unfairly abused, but it cannot defend itself. In contrast, truths found in the art of dialectic can defend themselves. Thus, the spoken is superior to the written word!

Michael D. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code 14 (2012).

The trouble is, if you don’t write it down, then you must enact people.

Categories
Miscellany

And Then There’s the Carrot

When April’s jobs numbers disappointed, the governors of South Carolina and Montana responded by cutting unemployment benefits. The idea is that, given the low minimum wage in those states, some low-wage workers are making more money by staying home and cashing unemployment checks than they could make working. Stop mailing the checks and they will get back to work—and work is good, because work means more restaurants can reopen and stay open for longer hours, making consumers happy.

Herein, of course, the stick: make workers lives’ worse so that they will cry uncle and go back to work.

Then there’s the carrot: convert the unemployment benefits into handouts. That is: stop conditioning the delivery of those unemployment checks on proof that the worker is unemployed.

That would send workers back to work because when you live at the bottom end of the income distribution you can always use more money. Even if you are already getting an extra $300 per week in unemployment, you are not exactly living the good life. You will go back to work to earn another $300 if the government won’t cut your $300 unemployment check if you do so.

Removing the requirement that a worker be unemployed to earn the current batch of extended federal unemployment gives workers a carrot for working: the extra wages they can earn, above and beyond those unemployment benefits, by going back to work.

I know removing that requirement undermines the paper rationale for unemployment insurance, which is to tide over people who are looking for work. But this country has a major inequality problem, this would be a one-time thing and Congress has already appropriated the money, and those currently receiving benefits (who, under this plan, are the only ones who would be made eligible to continue to receive payments even if they go back to work) are more likely to be poor and deserving than the vast swaths of the middle class that received stimulus checks over the past year.

(It might be a little unfair to those who did find jobs and went back to work, or those who didn’t lie about looking for work in order to get their checks. But as between a little unfairness and the stick, I say we go with unfairness. And if there’s money in the extended unemployment budget to pay out benefits to those who went off unemployment early, then we should do that, and the unfairness would be much reduced.)

Plus the fix that President Biden has mooted—making sure people on unemployment really are looking for work—is impossible to execute without a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy, which the Administration is not likely seriously to pursue anyway.

If you have the choice between achieving efficiency (getting people back to work) using the carrot or the stick, and the carrot is there, why not use it?

The worst you could do is make the poor a little richer.

Categories
Miscellany

Ménière’s Disease and the COVID Vaccines

A lifelong friend writes:

I took the first shot of the Pfizer COVID vaccine on January 16. Two days later I developed a feeling of fullness in my left ear, some sinus congestion, and chills, which I took to be side effects of the vaccine. The next day, the chills and congestion were gone, but the feeling of fullness–almost water-loggedness–in my ear has persisted since. But that was just the beginning. On January 29, my left ear started ringing and I had an attack of vertigo and vomiting that lasted several hours: the world spins around you making all forms of physical activity, including walking, impossible. Every day since then, I’ve had an attack of vertigo that lasts more than an hour, and the ringing and sense of fullness in my ear have ebbed and flowed, making it difficult to concentrate; indeed, the experience has been debilitating.

I saw a doctor yesterday, an eminent expert on hearing and balance, and he diagnosed Ménière’s disease. I asked him if this was triggered by the vaccine and he said that he has been seeing cases like this arising from the vaccines, as well as from COVID itself; he suggested that the vaccines may trigger inflammation in the ear that the body’s immune response does not eliminate. He recommended that, given my apparent reaction to the first shot, I not take the booster shot of the vaccine.

I saw another doctor today, and he insisted that there could be no connection between the vaccine and my condition and suggested that the fact that it started two days after I had taken the vaccine was pure chance. This doctor said that I should take the booster.

Although I have never had this sense of fullness or ringing in my ear before, and have never had daily attacks of vertigo before, I have had a total of three or four bouts of vertigo in the past; those occurred six to ten years ago and until now I had had none since.

Categories
Inframarginalism Miscellany Monopolization Philoeconomica

Was Personalized Pricing the Epstein Grift?

The Times reports that pedophile Jeffrey Epstein earned more than $100 million from private equity magnate Leon Black in exchange for providing some “idea-generator”-type tax advice on a handful of Black’s family trusts, advice that Black still had to pay his own tax lawyers to implement.

Does that mean that Epstein, who was a college dropout, was a self-taught tax genius? Not likely.

But it does suggest that Epstein knew the value of personalized pricing. Here’s the key passage from the article:

Jack Blum, a Washington lawyer who has led corruption investigations for several Senate committees, said he was surprised by the size of the fees Mr. Epstein’s work commanded. “You could be the best lawyer in Manhattan working on the most complicated trusts and estates and it would never come anywhere close to that kind of money,” he said.

Matthew Goldstein & Steve Eder, What Jeffrey Epstein Did to Earn $158 Million From Leon Black, N.Y. Times (Jan. 26, 2021).

So what gives?

The answer is that tax lawyers price for the marginal consumer: the marginal client using their services. They not only serve magnates like Leon Black, but also the merely rich, like an executive mentioned in the Times article whom Epstein initially refused to take on as a client for being insufficiently wealthy.

The merely rich can’t afford $100 million, so, to get their business, tax lawyers must charge them lower fees. When the truly rich, like Leon Black, go looking for tax advice, they knock on these lawyers’ doors, and the lawyers charge them about the same price they charge everyone else.

They don’t try to charge higher fees to their wealthiest clients because tax law is a reasonably competitive industry. You need to be smart to work at the high end of the field, but tax is not a field in which “the best are easily ten times better than the average.”

And for the many who do have what it takes, the cost of entry into the market is relative low; all you need is a JD and an LLM, which cost a few hundred thousand dollars to obtain, about the amount needed to open a cleaners or a pizzeria (okay, there’s also the opportunity cost of time spent in school, but we are still probably only talking about the high six figures).

So if you start raising your fees above what the marginal client is willing to pay, your super-rich inframarginal clients will take their business to another tax lawyer who is still pricing for the marginal client. So you, too, continue to price for the marginal client.

But what if you could find a way to charge your richest clients prices personalized to them, and not have them jump ship to your competitor?

It looks like Epstein’s grift was figuring out how to do that.

The answer, as in so many other lines of business, was to make tax advice into a luxury product: to make the product exclusive.

The Times tells us that Epstein sold himself to clients as a genius who would only give tax advice to the richest of the rich. He cultivated the image of being, not some pathetic, overworked, upwardly-mobile professional, but one of them, a fellow member of the super-rich who was willing to cut other members in on secrets that only they could access because of who they were.

Exclusivity creates brand loyalty, and brand loyalty means that you stop shopping around; you are willing to pay a price determined by what you can afford, rather then what competitors are offering. You are willing to pay, in other words, a personalized price.

Graphically, the tax market may have looked like this:

Gerrit De Geest observes in Rents: How Marketing Causes Inequality, that in today’s economy, it’s not those who make who earn all the profits, or those who distribute who earn all the profits; it’s those who do the marketing. That’s where all the rents live. Competition drives profits to zero for all save those who beguile.

It seems somehow fitting that this economy would spawn a figure like Epstein, who sold tax advice but didn’t even bother to do his legal work in house. He didn’t really sell tax advice; he marketed it.

As the Times recounts, Epstein referred one acquaintance to outside tax lawyers, whom the acquaintance then paid for tax advice, and then Epstein, having never mentioned a fee to this acquaintance, sent him a bill for 10% of the purported tax savings that the lawyers, and not Epstein, had created.

That 10% was the price of enchantment, nothing more.

But you still have to wonder how a private equity guy like Black, whose business revolves around deals hammered out by armies of lawyers and shaped by tax considerations, could have thought he was getting something special from Epstein.

Did he really think tax was like music, and it was worth paying his Mozart to dream up a tune, even if Black still had to pay someone else to write all the notes down for him?

Maybe he didn’t, and there’s more left to tell in this story.

Or maybe we need a new razor: Never attribute to conspiracy what can otherwise be attributed to marketing.

Categories
Monopolization World

Unlearning Trade

First we thought the inherent superiority of our political system would defeat the Chinese Communist Party. Now that we’re coming to terms with the fact that it didn’t, we seem to think that the inherent superiority of free markets will defeat China instead.

Clearly, we’re not taking learning in account.

But I don’t mean that we haven’t learned from our mistaken view that China would become more democratic as it became wealthier.

I mean that in assuming that China’s embrace of a new closed door policy will cause its technological competitiveness to wither, we are literally failing to take the relationship between learning and output into account.

The Wall Street Journal argues that by picking fights with the West, and getting itself banned from engaging in semiconductor trade with the US as a result, China has put itself in the deeply wasteful position of having to recreate a native semiconductor industry from scratch. If the moonshot fails, Chinese high tech firms will lag, and the country’s race to global dominance will be lost.

It would have been much better, argues the Journal, for China to have continued to make nice with the West and enjoy the benefits of trade, not least of which is the ability to leverage what others do best—like making semiconductors—to enable China to do what it does best—like making smartphones and 5G infrastructure.

The Achilles heel of this and all free trade arguments is that they don’t take innovation into account, and specifically that most valuable of all forms of innovation: learning by doing.

The fact that China is not an efficient producer of semiconductors today, and would be better off trading with those who are, does not mean that China cannot learn to be an efficient producer of semiconductors tomorrow.

And if China is able to learn, then the money it pours into starting more or less from scratch now won’t be wasted.

Instead, it will be the most important investment China has ever made, because it will buy not only a valuable skill, but something more valuable still: independence and a shot at world domination. The future belongs to high tech, the hardest thing to do in high tech is chips, and so if you’ve got the best chips, you will win eventually.

The key to learning is doing: the more you make, the better you get at making, which is why semiconductors have a downward sloping learning curve. As production volumes increase, cost falls and falls and falls.

That in turn means that if you want to produce the difficult-to-make things that render countries rich and powerful, the opposite of free trade dogma is required: you must shut out foreign competition, freeing up domestic demand for your native industries, so that those industries can ramp up supply and start marching down the learning curve.

If you don’t do that, then your domestic market will buy from foreign producers, helping them learn, not you.

Of course, too much protection can also be a problem. If your domestic industries are not subject to competitive pressures, they won’t have an incentive to learn. That can particularly vex small countries whose internal demand can only support one or two firms in a given market. But for a country the size of China, that’s not a problem. (Indeed, it’s no accident that free trade ideology has roots in Western Europe, home to lots of small- and medium-sized countries.)

So by picking fights with the West at a moment in its development when it has plenty of domestic demand for semiconductors (think Huawei) China is really just binding itself to the mast: committing its domestic market to its native semiconductor operations. It is forcing itself to learn.

And China does know how to learn. America installed the first solar panel in 1956, on the Vanguard I satellite. But at that time a single panel cost the equivalent of $500,000 today, meaning that we weren’t very good at applying the technology. As we made more solar panels, however, we got much better, as the solar learning curve below shows. But by the early 2000s learning had stagnated at around $5 per module.

Then China, which is energy poor but for coal—a mature technology that promises few gains from innovation—embraced solar, installing panels across its vast peripheral deserts.

By doing, China learned to do better, driving price south of 50 cents per module by 2019, making solar power the cheapest in the world today, more so even than coal or gas, and coming to dominate the global solar industry.

Will China walk just as quickly down the semiconductor learning curve? You can bet on it. And the country’s leadership in the new technology of quantum computing—the future of chips—means that it is not starting all that far behind its global competitors.

So when the Wall Street Journal says things like this:

Beijing is essentially now engaged in a massive, long-shot attempt to build from the ground up an advanced semiconductor manufacturing capability that doesn’t depend on foreign suppliers—churning through gargantuan amounts of the Chinese people’s money in the process. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, a better economic strategy would be to mend its relations with the West and reform China’s dysfunctional credit system—then import chips and let Chinese markets and Chinese companies decide what China is really good at.

Nathaniel Taplin, China’s State Capitalism Collides With Its Technological Ambitions, Wall St. J. (Jan. 2, 2021).

I have to wonder at its lack of learning.

And as I have pointed out elsewhere, the really funny thing about this mode of thought—the notion that a country is better off not trying to do the things that it is not right now good at doing—is that those who love it most also tend to be those who, when they turn their gaze to domestic markets, talk most about innovation and learning, and the need to protect firms from too much competition in order to promote them.

They argue in favor of monopoly and against regulation at home on the ground that shelter from competition is a necessary reward for innovation, that though big firms may destroy “static competition”—competition over price by firms with fixed levels of technical skill—doing so actually enables “dynamic competition”—competition to learn and innovate that eventually leads to far greater benefits for society.

So they ought to know better than to assume that a new Chinese closed door policy will save America from China.

Indeed, the Journal’s faith in free trade reminds me a bit of Ah Q, the eponymous antihero of The True Story of Ah Q, by the great early 20th century Chinese writer Lu Xun.

Ah Q’s talent, you see, was convincing himself he was the winner whenever he lost a fight.

To be sure, Ah Q was a metaphor for the much-oppressed China of a century ago, whereas America is still on top today.

But mentality is fate.