Newswise — David Coates, Worrell Professor of Anglo-American Studies at Wake Forest University, says that the argument about the United States moving into a 'new economy' can be overstated.
"Yes, the federal government is now heavily involved in ownership in sectors not normally so treated, such as the financial and automotive sectors," he says, "but the federal government has long been a big economic player through Pentagon contracts, agricultural subsidies and National Institutes of Health research funding, just to name a few examples." Coates says current economic stimulus spending is just more of the same, but temporary. "The stimulus spending is designed to trigger renewed private sector economic growth, and then to fade away in a traditional Keynesian manner," he says, "and the new ownership role in the key automotive sector is explicitly designed to be of limited duration. Similar moves in and out of bank and car industry ownership have occurred in other industrial countries at crisis moments since 1973, and there is no reason to expect the current U.S. trajectory to be different."
In addition, Coates suggests the United States needs more, not less, active industrial policy in order to address looming issues of long-term economic decline such as de-industrialization, a persistent shortfall in worker skills and the international trade deficit.
Finally, Coates suggests that the term 'new economy' is being used to provoke fear that the United States is becoming a socialist country. "We're not," he says. "This is just an incremental shift towards a more managed economy, and after the financial meltdown, the case for a more carefully regulated financial sector is visibly stronger."
Coates researches the increasingly global nature of production and trade as well as 'third way politics' in the United States. He previously served as director of the International Center for Labor Studies at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom.
Wake Forest has C and Ku band satellite uplink and Vyvx fiber optic access, as well as ISDN connectivity.
RSS