Eamonn Fingleton's commentaries on the politics and economics of American decline
Published in The International Economy Summer 2024. When Robert Lighthizer published his memoirs last year, it was no surprise that he let rip at free trade. After all, he is a protectionist who, in his erstwhile capacity as United Continue reading
Lighthizer, Robert. No Trade Is Free: Changing Course, Taking on China, and Helping America s Workers: New York: Broadside Books, 2023. When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir? Often attributed to John Maynard Keynes, this Continue reading
East Asia s economic policymakers have identified the manufacture of advanced intermediate goods as the key to economic leadership. Such goods include the highly purified materials, the precisely engineered components and the state-of-the-art production machines needed by other nations to make the world s consumer goods. The special significance of advanced intermediate Continue reading
By Eamonn Fingleton America’s shuttered factories and the false hope of post-industrialism. (This article first appeared in the November-December 2022 issue of The American Conservative.) In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the American nation Continue reading
Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell convinced America that manufacturing didn’t matter. He was wrong. By Eamonn Fingleton In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. Navy doubled its fleet within a year and quadrupled it before Continue reading
By Eamonn Fingleton (This article appears in the January-February 2022 issue of The American Conservative. To read it in pdf form, please click here.) In April 1998 Sony Corporation chairman Norio Ohga made world headlines with this comment: “The Japanese economy Continue reading
In Dublin, Ireland, where I have lived in recent years, many observers view East Asian economics as a remote issue of little interest in Western Europe. As I discovered the other day, it is an attitude shared even by some Continue reading
By Eamonn Fingleton If you Google Laurens van der Post and Hiroshima , you ll turn up hundreds of thousands of results. This confirms something that some observers have known for years: that though the South African-born author Laurens van der Post Continue reading
By Eamonn Fingleton It is a question that comes up every year: was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima justified? This year the 75th anniversary of the attack the question seems more pertinent than ever. The bombing, which took Continue reading
If you click through on the headings below, you can get to the articles concerned. Most of them focus on international trade or American decline or both. For my first item, however, I chose something different partly because it Continue reading