Spring 2024 / Volume VIII, Number 1 DOWNLOAD PDF Technological Competition amid Stagnation A New Era for the Chinese Semiconductor Industry: Beijing Responds to Export Controls by Paul Triolo China’s domestic semiconductor industry landscape has changed considerably. The Biden administration has continued to impose export control restrictions on Chinese firms, and the October 7, 2022, package of controls targeted not only advanced semiconductors (such as GPUs used for running artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads) but also expanded significantly on controls over semiconductor manu­facturing equipment (SME). One goal of the U.S. controls is to prevent Chinese firms from moving into nonplanar technology processes, such as FinFET and eventually Gate All Around (GAA). The new restric­tions included novel end-use controls and controls on U.S. persons, posing major new challenges… Lessons from the Corporate Labs: Technological Competition in a Changing Business Environment by Henry Kressel The economic success of the United States in creating the digital world owes a great deal to two key factors. The first is the ability to innovate great technologies, and the second is the ability to turn these innovations into major industrial products. This creative success was not the result of a lack of international… How Economic Theory Went Wrong by Andrew Smithers Well-managed economies grow at a decent pace while keeping unemployment and inflation at low and stable levels. By these criteria, all major developed countries have been run incompetently for the past two decades. They have experienced stagnation of output and incomes, the worst recessions since the Great Depression, and, more recently, a surge in inflation.… The Direction of the Left Omelets with Eggshells: On the Failure of the Millennial Left by Alex Hochuli In the final analysis, the Left became the last defender of neoliberalism, not its undertaker. For all its denunciations, was it incapable of imagining anything else? Too many of its practices reflected back some of the worst features of the current order: short-termism; a bias against political programs, mass organization and institution-building; and reliance on media and charismatic leaders. This is why the 2010s are a historic missed opportunity: when amid signs of mass revolt for the first time in decades, the ostensible forces of utopianism sought to change the content of politics without challenging the neoliberal shell that contained it—to make an omelet without breaking any eggs… The Other Great Replacement: Where Have All the Democrats Gone? by Micah Meadowcroft Much is said these days about manufacturing, but what about meatpacking? Chicago, the big-shouldered city of Carl Sandburg’s America—before toolmaker or player with railroads—was hog butcher for the world. As John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira note in last year’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, working in meatpacking paid 25 percent more than a mean… The Causes of the Latest Border Crisis, and How to Fix It by Robert C. Thornett How did illegal immigration along the U.S.-Mexico border become the mess that it is? U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) encounters with migrants averaged under 600,000 in fiscal years 2010–20, but tripled in fiscal 2021, the year Biden took office, to a record of nearly 1.9 million, and reached 3.2 million in fiscal 2023. What… The Art of the Possible Overthrowing the Dictatorship of No Alternatives by Roberto Mangabeira Unger The world remains restless under the yoke of a dictatorship of no alternatives. The last great moment of institutional and ideological refoundation in the rich North Atlantic countries was the institutionally conservative social democracy presaged before the Second World War and fully developed in those countries after the war. Its counterpart in the United States was Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. This refoundation offered to regulate the economy more intensively, to attenuate inequalities through progressive taxation and redistributive social spend­ing, and to manage the economy countercyclically by fiscal and mone­tary policy. In its most elaborate form, in Western Europe, it protected insiders against outsiders in the labor market (defending the stable… Rediscovering the Readjusters: Remembering a Lost Multiracial, Working-Class Movement by Sam Mulopulos Imagine a multiracial populist movement composed of middle- and working-class voters. Now imagine that they sweep into power on a platform of lower taxes, less government debt, and better schools, and once in office, they manage to accomplish this agenda. To many, it sounds like such a movement is too good to be true. The… The Five Crises of the Fifth French Republic by Mathis Bitton Precisely at this moment when the world is converging toward de Gaulle’s ideas, France is abandoning them altogether. Instead of embracing industrial policy, France has liberalized its economy. In­stead of doubling down on republican ideals, France has weakened its conception of citizenship. Instead of celebrating judicial restraint, France has empowered judges at the expense of voters… Fragile Identities Not So Black and White: Ethnicity versus Identity Politics in Newark by Stephen G. Adubato Last October, I made my way down to St. Lucy’s Church in Newark’s North Ward, as I do every year. I waited in a seemingly endless line of cars to cram into a makeshift parking lot, and I looked in my rearview mirror to see a diverse crowd of people under bright deco­rative lights intertwined with red and green garland, a sea of food trucks, and the steeple of a nearly century-old Romanesque church. After parking, I followed the voice of an amateur Sinatra impersonator doing a 1950s-standards rendition of Palestrina’s “Ave Maria,” even­tu­ally finding my way into the church, as I stepped over children run­ning around with toys won… How Feminism Ends by Ginevra Davis At least, the timing of the redefinition of “woman” is convenient. At the exact moment that we are implicitly evaluating the results of a century’s worth of upheaval on sexual roles, the key demographic in question has become almost impossible to describe. Still, I never found the “transgender question,” as Todd calls it, particularly interesting. It seemed like a red herring on the quest to understand women. But I came back to it, because there is something, certainly, going on with women… More Christian than the Christians by Sheluyang Peng Last year, a cascade of books came off conservative presses, each taking turns striking at the recent phenomenon of “wokeness.” These offerings include polemics and instructional manuals such as Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom, School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated Ameri­can Schools and Why We Must Reclaim Them,…