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means providing the educational reform is desperately needed to

train workers for jobs where they will not be displaced by robots.
And it means thinking more carefully about how to balance foreign
and domestic concerns when thinking about trade policy. We can
best bolster growth by investing in our own industrial commons and
creating a twenty-­ first-­
century digital ecosystem that supports,
rather than degrades, liberal values and democracy. Addressing
those issues is the right way to protect national security.

Patriotic Capitalism

The technology industry goes well beyond even Big Ag in terms of

capturing the full complexity of globalization over the last half cen-
tury. The industry involves geopolitics, national security, and ulti-
mately, even national sovereignty. We have the Washington
Consensus and the Beijing Consensus, but we also have what some
might call the Silicon Valley Consensus, in which digital giants in
both the United States and China operate in the same sphere, and on
the same terms, as nation-­states themselves. Big Tech firms can lo-
cate their trillions of dollars of asset wealth anywhere, which is why
they typically pay a far lower percentage of revenue in tax than
other types of multinational companies. They are the most global of
businesses. And yet, in our new tripolar world, they also like to pre-
tend that they are national “champions” of innovation in need of
protection from the U.S. government, even as they try to do as much
business in China as possible. This inevitably leads to hypocrisy.
Witness the way corporate leaders like Apple’s Tim Cook have been
obliged to agree to all sorts of censorship and user privacy violations
in China that never would have been accepted at home.27
The truth is that both Big Tech and China are monopolies—­it’s
just that the former exists in the private sector, and the latter oper-
ates under the guise of a state. Unfortunately, politicians and busi-
ness leaders operating within the neoliberal paradigm now find
themselves at a crucial disadvantage. While Chinese companies have
the protection and support of the state, U.S. and, to a lesser extent,

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European firms are left to their own devices. This works if you are
Apple, but not so well if you are Qualcomm, which has been caught
up in the heavy geopolitics of the new world order. It eventually
settled its patent disputes with Apple, but while the FTC’s antitrust
charges were dropped (helped in part by the Department of Justice,
which made it clear that the company had crucial value to national
security),28 Qualcomm faces continuing restrictions on how it does
business in both the East and the West. In the post-­neoliberal world,
companies can no longer fly completely above the concerns of the
nation-­states in which they operate.
Multinationals like Qualcomm sit uncomfortably in the middle
of this new world. And its story raises the key questions for the next
era of capitalism: Where do the responsibilities of companies lie?
With shareholders in the traditional neoliberal paradigm or with
stakeholders in a new paradigm that is just now starting to form?
Does a business owe anything to its home country? Or does it float
above any one nation to be part of some stateless global commu-
nity? If business has benefited from the taxpayer-­funded commons,
how can any one government ensure the country itself benefits from
corporate success? In short, can the fruits of a global corporation
like Qualcomm be harvested at home? Is it possible to be both global
and local? I believe the answer is yes. But, in a world that will have
at least two, if not three, separate tech/trade and digital tax para-
digms, it will require a new social compact for business.
On this point, the West should not kid itself. While the usual
suspects in policy circles are talking up a reset in relations with
China, and while business interests complain that economic decou-
pling with the United States is impossible, the truth is that China is
very much going its own way. Xi Jinping has committed himself to
“the great rejuvenation of the Chinese race.” In speech after speech
(in Chinese, and not translated into English by state media, which
instead publishes bland statements about win-­win cooperation with
the West), he says that the current world order is not fit for China
and that China intends to change it. The country will, he says, use its
military to defend its interests all over the world. He claims to be

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building “a community of common destiny for all mankind” and

wants Chinese-­style techno authoritarianism to be copied by coun-
tries around the world. Xi has called on people with Chinese heri-
tage anywhere on earth, no matter their citizenship, to join together
as “sons and daughters of the Yellow Emperor” who are obliged to
work for the “great rejuvenation” in whatever way the party deems
fit.29
Some of this may be the sort of nationalistic rhetoric that many
political leaders use to try to drum up support for their regimes. But
whatever interpretation one might give to the details, it’s clear what
the vectorial direction of China today is—­toward more, not less,
top-­down control of what is already the world’s largest surveillance
state. The United States, Europe, and all other nations now have two
choices: be looped into the Chinese orbit or forge a new model for a
post-­neoliberal world.
Assuming the choice is the latter, both businesses and govern-
ments will have to change the way they operate. Paradigm shifts are
challenging, but already Covid-­19 has presented some very interest-
ing new opportunities for reinvention. Start with what’s happening
in the business sector itself. If there is a silver lining to the Covid-­19
crisis, it is the remarkable creativity shown by the many businesses
that thrived by transforming themselves in unexpected ways during
the pandemic. The examples I’ve come across are numerous. There
is the airport security company that made plans to launch a vaccine-­
tracking app after the travel business tanked. Or the mall and store
owners renting out empty retail areas to schools that needed more
space for students to social-­distance during lessons. Or the in-­person
event companies that quickly transitioned to digital businesses.
More new business applications were filed in 2020 in the United
States than in any year on record—­applications were up 24 percent
from 2019.30 But 2021 was even better: Applications rose 42 per-
cent in the first nine months compared to the same period in 2019.
Yes, brick-­and-­mortar retail is still lagging, and the travel and tour-
ism industry may never be what it once was, but areas like ecom-
merce, fintech, and healthcare are positively booming. This kind of

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Schumpeterian creative destruction is just what you want at a time

like this. But the rise of entirely new kinds of businesses also creates
new challenges for both capital and labor. I’d point to three particu-
larly pressing issues that will require more attention from policy
makers.
First is the question of how to value and protect intangible as-
sets, which after the pandemic will probably double as a percentage
of corporate investment. Most big business battles today are over
who owns what slice of the digital pie. Consider the case in U.S.
federal court between Epic Games and Apple over App Store com-
missions. Or the fight over pandemic exemptions to World Trade
Organization rules around intellectual property to bolster vaccine
production. Or Google and Apple battling it out with SAP, Siemens,
and BASF over patent protection in Germany. As a greater percent-
age of corporate wealth is held in intangible assets, these types of
conflicts will only increase. This underscores the desperate need for
a twenty-­first-­century transatlantic alliance around technology reg-
ulation and digital trade rules. China is going its own way on many
of these matters, but Europe and the United States must not. Re-
gional unity can, and should, replace laissez-­faire globalization that
denies the incongruities of the One World, Two Systems paradigm.
The second big issue is that the expansion of intangible assets
will probably mean fewer jobs in the short term even as it creates
new businesses and entirely different industries over the longer term.
Neither the public nor the private sector in the United States is grap-
pling fully with this problem. In the United States, for example, with
the exception of groups like the Freelancers Union or the National
Domestic Workers Alliance, the labor movement is focused largely
on protecting traditional forty-­hour-­a-­week work that comes with
benefits. Companies are meanwhile trying to push more and more
people into gig work and to replace as many jobs as possible with
technology. There are ways to bridge the gap. Portable benefits have
long been proposed by politicians such as Sen. Mark Warner, a Vir-
ginia Democrat.31 They would allow independent contractors to
carry health and pensions coverage with them from job to job, rather

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than having them tied to employment with a single company. I’m

also a fan of the idea of taxing and redistributing some of the mas-
sive wealth captured by corporate data collectors. This includes not
just the big platform giants, but many other types of companies,
from online retailers to consumer goods brands. California gover-
nor Gavin Newsom has already proposed a digital dividend for con-
sumers, a version of which could be implemented in both the United
States and Europe.32 The proceeds could go to workforce training or
to improve public education. Both would act as a buffer against
looming digital labor shocks.
Third, while antitrust action is desperately needed to ensure a
level playing field in the age of platform monopolies, we need to
stop looking for a silver-­bullet solution on competition. I suspect
there are going to be a lot of different solutions for different compa-
nies. A company like Amazon could easily be broken up into a retail
platform and a logistics provider. Others, like Google, might be
turned into tightly regulated public utilities, which would mirror the
way corporate behemoths of the past, from railroads to telecom,
were put in check when they became too large and powerful. Real-­
world rules and regulations must be made to apply to the online
world as well. Otherwise, digital players can easily use regulatory
arbitrage to jump around even the largest incumbents in the most
powerful industries. Even too-­big-­to-­fail bank executives, like Jamie
Dimon, chief executive of JPMorgan, have warned in recent years
about commercial banking being replaced by fintech.33 Change is
good. However, if we don’t acknowledge the full extent of the trans-
formation we are going through, we’ll end up with all the problems
of the prepandemic economy, but on steroids.34
This process is going to require some coordination of public and
private resources by the state. That’s not about picking winners or
losers, and it’s certainly not about becoming a top-­down Big Tech–­
run version of the Chinese surveillance state. It’s simply about bring-
ing a smidgen of strategic and long-­term foresight to the way the
U.S. economy is run. In a world in which we have to compete with
state-­run giants like in China, which think on fifty-­year time hori-

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zons, quarterly capitalism simply doesn’t cut it anymore (not that it

ever really did). Most countries today have some form of national
industrial strategy to ensure the well-­being of citizens rather than
just shareholders, and the United States needs one, too. Indeed, it did
successfully implement a mini-­industrial policy with its Covid-­19
vaccine effort. The federal government supplied about $14 billion
worth of subsidies to pharmaceutical companies to produce a vac-
cine as quickly as possible. By guaranteeing massive orders up front
and covering other costs (retrofitting manufacturing plants, for ex-
ample), Washington eliminated most private-­sector risk. This en-
abled corporations to throw everything at finding a rapid solution.
The National Institutes of Health also supplied companies with
much of the sequencing work and access to its vast databases. As a
result, the country went from sequencing the virus in January 2020
to phase three trials by October of that year. In the history of medi-
cine, nothing like this had been achieved. “This is a historic, unprec-
edented achievement,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told a think tank webinar
in December 2020.35
And yet, the United States has a long way to go to regain its
muscle memory about how to achieve broader goals for industrial
policy. As we’ve already learned, industrial policy has its roots in
America, but over the past forty years, the United States has moved
completely away from any kind of state involvement in the econ-
omy. Research shows that U.S. multinational corporations and the
Chinese benefited from this approach, but most workers in the de-
veloped world did not. The Deese speech in 2021 outlined several
ways the Biden administration plans to address this, most specifi-
cally by rebuilding the United States’ semiconductor supply chains.
This should involve allies who will help bolster demand and also
innovation across a newly revamped ecosystem that will make ev-
eryone less reliant on Taiwan. If anything, the U.S. plan isn’t radical
enough—­yet. We could do more to help build back better, stronger,
and faster; one way to cut through the bureaucracy would be to ap-
point a resiliency czar who would answer to the president. Such a
person could bring together all the various departments across gov-

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ernment faster, addressing things like the most-­needed critical infra-

structure, connections between the public and private sector, and
areas where there is low-­hanging fruit to be plucked to create more
resiliency. Industrial policy by its very nature requires action at the
top, but the process shouldn’t become too cumbersome or involve
too many different budget line sheets or vested interests, lest it drag
along too slowly to do any good.

Wanted: A Resiliency Czar

A valuable guide to this approach can be found in a lengthy paper

entitled “Anticipatory Governance,” which proposed ways to help
the executive branch cope with “the increasing speed and complex-
ity of major challenges.” The paper was written in October 2012 by
Leon Fuerth, a veteran Foreign Service Officer who was national
security advisor to Vice President Al Gore. As Fuerth puts it, “If we
are to remain a well-­functioning republic and a prosperous nation,
the U.S. government cannot rely indefinitely on crisis management,
no matter how adroit. We must get out ahead of events or we risk
being overtaken by them . . . Our 19th-­century government is simply
not built for the nature of the 21st-­century challenges.”36
A resiliency czar, perhaps someone with a defense background—­
military types tend to focus on the synchronization of complex sys-
tems, from infrastructure and logistics to technology and people, as
everyday business37—­could work to create a kind of 3-­D picture of
all the resources available to meet the White House goals (e.g.,
world-­beating private-­sector businesses, top vocational schools or
industrial programs, areas with too much or too little skilled labor).
Simply creating this kind of knowledge hub and then allowing any-
one who wanted to do so to tap it would go a long way. Think how
it might have helped those private-­sector textile companies trying to
retool themselves to create masks amid the pandemic without much
help from the Trump White House or anyone else. If there were a
place these companies could go to quickly find out the best place to
source demand from the public or private sector, get tax incentives

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