Miguel Afonso Caetano<p>"It's because of China alone, really, that the entire world now has an abundance of cheap manufactured goods, from gadgets to air conditioners, and increasingly higher-end items like cars. But it hasn't significantly redounded to the benefit of Chinese shareholders. There's been a bit of a rally lately, but mostly it's been pretty dead money.</p><p>I think there is a sense in which successful efforts like China’s Made in 2025 initiative can be understood as an Operation Warp Speed policy across several key industries that have managed to harness private initiative but also made it so that private industry keeps plowing those profits back into more research and investment, leaving little left over for the shareholder.</p><p>And so what I worry about when I read Thompson and Klein talk about Operation Warp Speed is that they're right, and that this kind of public-private interplay is necessary for actual abundance, but that the US economy, as it operates, can't withstand the sustained, costly investment necessary for it to work; that our existing economic model has too much riding on a perpetual rise in the value of financial assets and that this would be threatened if profits keep having to get reinvested for the public good.</p><p>And that, therefore, what reads like a happy, wonky replication of a successful endeavor actually amounts to a dramatic rethinking of our political economy that would require a tremendous amount of will on both sides of the aisle, and a totally new way of establishing broad-based economic stability. It might be good and necessary, but getting there is a political project far beyond getting liberals to see things through a new lens."</p><p><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-24/i-want-to-believe-in-abundance" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">bloomberg.com/news/newsletters</span><span class="invisible">/2025-03-24/i-want-to-believe-in-abundance</span></a></p><p><a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/USA" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>USA</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/China" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>China</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Abundance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Abundance</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Manufacturing" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Manufacturing</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Liberals" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Liberals</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Economy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Economy</span></a> <a href="https://tldr.nettime.org/tags/Liberals" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Liberals</span></a></p>