Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 3: M Joe Wisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: Tracy, Uh, did you ever see the musical Hamilton?
Speaker 4: No?
Speaker 3: I didn't. Can I just say listeners? Joe has already
Speaker 3: asked me this question in preparation for the podcast, and
Speaker 3: he actually did a really amazing summary of all of Hamilton.
Speaker 3: You didn't sing it or wrap it, which I think
Speaker 3: you should have done, but it was pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, look, I think can I just say,
Speaker 2: like I actually did like it at the time that
Speaker 2: I saw it, and I still like, if I'm in
Speaker 2: the car with my kids, like it's not bad to
Speaker 2: put on. I feel like liking Hamilton. It's a little
Speaker 2: cringe now. It's very like, you know.
Speaker 3: Very stream for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's like you're a little twenty tens.
Speaker 2: It's a little bit like we sort of moved on,
Speaker 2: but like, it is an entertaining show. It's not the
Speaker 2: worst as far as musicals go, many of which are
Speaker 2: very bad in my opinion, it's not the worst one.
Speaker 3: It definitely kind of vaulted Hamilton. It feels weird to
Speaker 3: say this now, but I guess it vaulted him into
Speaker 3: the public consciousness. But it's interesting because as far as
Speaker 3: I understand, and here I have to confess that I
Speaker 3: never really did US history when I was in high school.
Speaker 3: I was in Austria and then Japan. So this is
Speaker 3: a big blind spot for me. But when I think
Speaker 3: of Hamilton now, I think of like the federalist papers,
Speaker 3: maybe the financial system. But it turns out there's this
Speaker 3: huge body of Hamiltonian thought that is all about the
Speaker 3: real economy and I guess manufacturing, industrial policy development.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and this is not at all in I haven't
Speaker 2: read the Wrong Churnall biography, but it's certainly not in
Speaker 2: the US. And basically the play or the musical like
Speaker 2: sort of you know, he has these rat battles with
Speaker 2: Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker 3: And Joe summarize the rap battles.
Speaker 2: And you know, obviously Thomas Jefferson is a defender of
Speaker 2: the system of slavery. And what's important is like doing
Speaker 2: the planting and all you guys do up north is
Speaker 2: like finance, but we're supposed to be on the side
Speaker 2: of finance. Is the audience in this and set it,
Speaker 2: you know, first Secretary of the Treasury. But as you
Speaker 2: point out, there is much more to Hamilton than just
Speaker 2: this sort of like dichotomy of the slave owning plantation
Speaker 2: owners in the South and then those of us up
Speaker 2: in New York City who just do numbers and finance.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I guess the other thing to point out is,
Speaker 3: obviously industrial policy is having a moment since the pandemic,
Speaker 3: and we've seen various steps and projects from the Biden administration,
Speaker 3: including the IRA and things like that. So it's kind
Speaker 3: of interesting to go back in time and consider the
Speaker 3: American historical HAMILTONI in roots of progressive industrial policy.
Speaker 2: Well, and this comes out every time we do an
Speaker 2: episode like on the Chips Act or the Inflational Reduction Act,
Speaker 2: et cetera. Someone says, well, you know, industrial policy is
Speaker 2: not this new thing in America, and as if we
Speaker 2: did this in the past, and they start to leave
Speaker 2: it there. But I think it's a good idea to
Speaker 2: like actually start exploring some of those historical roots of
Speaker 2: the role that the federal government can and has played
Speaker 2: in the past in channeling industries, channeling capital, channeling real
Speaker 2: physical resources, promoting domestic manufacturing. Because everyone says Oh, we
Speaker 2: always did this in the past, but we sort of
Speaker 2: have to talk more about what that past looked like.
Speaker 3: Yes, so this is the episode for anyone who has
Speaker 3: ever said that statement. The US has a long history
Speaker 3: of this industrial policy.
Speaker 2: We're going to go back to the very beginning. Well,
Speaker 2: I'm really excited about our guests. Like I said, I
Speaker 2: never read the wrong Turnout Biography, but I did read
Speaker 2: radical Hamilton Economic Lessons from a misunderstood founder. The author,
Speaker 2: Christian Parenti, is joining us. He is a professor in
Speaker 2: the John Jay Economics program that housed within the Quney
Speaker 2: System of New York City. So, Christian Prenti, thank you
Speaker 2: so much for coming on odd Lots.
Speaker 5: Thank you very much for inviting me.
Speaker 2: I loved your book, But did you want have you?
Speaker 2: Did you watch the musical?
Speaker 5: I did not watch the musical. I don't really like musicals,
Speaker 5: so I.
Speaker 2: Have a complicated view towards musicals myself, so I totally
Speaker 2: get that. Why did you think another Hamilton book was necessary?
Speaker 5: Well, I did read the Churnout Biography, and while reading it,
Speaker 5: there's a mention of the report on the subject of manufacturers,
Speaker 5: which is Hamilton's magnum opus in many ways, and it
Speaker 5: is an argument for in a blueprint for planning to
Speaker 5: drive a transition from an agrarian based economy to a
Speaker 5: manufacturing based economy. And that was very interesting to me,
Speaker 5: and I tried to find more on it, and there
Speaker 5: really wasn't that much in the literature. So this book
Speaker 5: actually began by mistake. Almost The idea was to republish
Speaker 5: the report on the subjects of Manufacturers, and I would
Speaker 5: do an introduction, and then the introduction turned into a
Speaker 5: book long away. It was like, oh, we'll have it
Speaker 5: as at appendix, but that just you know, it became
Speaker 5: an effort to fill in the gap around Hamilton's thinking
Speaker 5: about the real economy and about what we would call
Speaker 5: industrialization or industrial policy, but what they called manufacturers.
Speaker 3: Why do you think that Hamilton's legacy is so much
Speaker 3: more focused, I suppose on the federalist papers on maybe
Speaker 3: building the financial system versus the paper that you just mentioned,
Speaker 3: Because again I will confess that before I read the book,
Speaker 3: I had never heard of that particular piece of Hamilton writing.
Speaker 5: Part of it has to do with the fact that
Speaker 5: the report on manufacturers was controversial from the beginning, and
Speaker 5: there was pushback from the beginning, and there has been
Speaker 5: pushback against the kinds of policies that it advocated all
Speaker 5: the way through, so it just sort of dropped away.
Speaker 5: And there is a mythology about American capitalism which tries
Speaker 5: to minimize the role of government in that story. And
Speaker 5: so that's why we have previously hadn't thought sufficiently about
Speaker 5: the Report on the Subject of Manufacturers, because it clashes
Speaker 5: with prevailing notions about how capitalism works, which is that
Speaker 5: it's all about free enterprise and entrepreneurs and free trade.
Speaker 5: And in fact, what the story of Hamilton's Report on
Speaker 5: the Subject of Manufacturers shows, and I think you can
Speaker 5: see it throughout world history, is that successful capitalist industrialization
Speaker 5: pretty much always involves an activist state that intervenes, gets
Speaker 5: prices wrong, and helps drive an economy towards manufacturing. In fact,
Speaker 5: in the beginning of the Report on the Subject of Manufacturers,
Speaker 5: Hamilton launches a critique of Adam Smith. Hamilton supposedly wrote
Speaker 5: a whole treatment of Smith's Wealth of Nations, but that's
Speaker 5: been lost to us. But that's why. And I studied
Speaker 5: with Alice Amsden, who's passed away, who is an economist
Speaker 5: at the New School many many years ago, and she
Speaker 5: wrote the definitive book, or sort of the first big
Speaker 5: book on Korean industrialization. It was all about this, and
Speaker 5: so that really interested me and the similarity, you know,
Speaker 5: the fact that the US at the beginning of the
Speaker 5: story of American capitalism is the story of a developmentalist state,
Speaker 5: and I've been interested in those questions as they appear
Speaker 5: in the global South.
Speaker 3: It's funny you mentioned Korea's development because we did an
Speaker 3: episode Joe. I don't know if you remember many many
Speaker 3: years ago about the development of the k pop and
Speaker 3: entertainment industry in South Korea and how much of it
Speaker 3: was actually driven by a conscious government effort. Where a
Speaker 3: lot of people think even this kind of creative industry
Speaker 3: develops naturally, but in the case of South Korea, there
Speaker 3: was a lot of support.
Speaker 2: I actually have Elis Anderson's book Escaped from Empire to
Speaker 2: Developing World's Journey through Heaven and Hell on my bookshelf.
Speaker 5: I need to read that book there.
Speaker 2: What were the economic conditions in the US at the
Speaker 2: time or I guess was it the US in the
Speaker 2: colonies at the time that Hamilton was looking at that.
Speaker 2: He's a okay, we need to talk about a government
Speaker 2: role in manufacturing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, to some extent, this gets into why the revolution occurred,
Speaker 5: and British mercantilism was putting very explicit and onerous restrictions
Speaker 5: on economic development in the United States. For example, hat
Speaker 5: makers in the US couldn't have more than two apprentices. Right.
Speaker 5: There was a robust fur trade and beaver pelts were
Speaker 5: much in demand in Europe for making hats, and the
Speaker 5: US had a nascent hat industry and British economic policies
Speaker 5: made it illegal for it to develop as much as
Speaker 5: it could. Similarly, around iron smelting, iron could only be
Speaker 5: processed to a certain level. So there were very real
Speaker 5: restrictions on the development of manufacturers because Britain held these
Speaker 5: thirteen colonies as colonies, and so they wanted these colonies
Speaker 5: as a market. So that's one of the reasons actually
Speaker 5: that northern kind of nascent manufacturing interests gravitate towards revolutionary
Speaker 5: cause there's other there's all sorts of interests, right, I mean,
Speaker 5: it's like the rhetoric of freedom is appealing to the
Speaker 5: working classes in the slaves South. There was fear that
Speaker 5: the British Empire was going to restrict slavery, because there
Speaker 5: is the Summerset case in seventeen seventy three. I think
Speaker 5: it is in which a planter, a British planter in Jamaica,
Speaker 5: comes back to England with an enslaved person and that
Speaker 5: person gets in touch with abolitionists who say, you know,
Speaker 5: slavery is illegal in England, even though though it's legal
Speaker 5: in the colonies. This goes all the way through the
Speaker 5: English court system and it is ruled that yes, you
Speaker 5: may be enslaved in Jamaica, but as soon as you
Speaker 5: set foot in England you are free. This sent shockwaves
Speaker 5: of fear throughout the elites of the South. One of
Speaker 5: the richest people in the British Empire was a South
Speaker 5: Carolina slave owner, Henry Lawrence, who later is actually President
Speaker 5: of the Continental Congress, and he felt threatened like, well,
Speaker 5: now I can't travel to England with my chattel, slavery,
Speaker 5: my servants. What's next. Maybe they're going to come after
Speaker 5: slavery entirely. Because there was a movement also in the
Speaker 5: northern colonies against slavery. So there's a whole variety of
Speaker 5: causes that coalesce and drive many of the colonists. Though
Speaker 5: not all to embrace revolution and independence. The economic conditions,
Speaker 5: getting back to your question, were pretty underdeveloped. Agriculture was
Speaker 5: predominant in the south. The economy was dominated by large planters.
Speaker 5: Most white Southerners didn't own slaves, but almost half did
Speaker 5: own slaves, but most slaves were owned by a small
Speaker 5: group of men who owned many, many slaves and much land.
Speaker 5: So that was the southern economy. And in the north
Speaker 5: you had small family farms, and there'd almost been a
Speaker 5: kind of repeasantization in that many of these farms were
Speaker 5: quite self sufficient and had only a tenuous connection to
Speaker 5: the cache economy of war. The revolutionary war will actually
Speaker 5: drive many of those northern tier farmers into the cash
Speaker 5: economy because they have to pay taxes and they have
Speaker 5: to come up with cash. So and in those northern
Speaker 5: family farms there were small craft productions. There was home
Speaker 5: based productions generally, you know, like building. Along with your
Speaker 5: self sufficient farm, you maybe produce a little extra dairy
Speaker 5: for the market, but then also in the winter you
Speaker 5: create barrel staves or shoes or something like that. So
Speaker 5: there was this workshop based manufacturing. There are no American banks,
Speaker 5: and the thirteen colonies are all independent there's no transportation network,
Speaker 5: so after the war it's an absolute mess. And Hamilton's
Speaker 5: concern is first and foremost national security, because we're going
Speaker 5: to be reconquered and recolonized if we don't have a
Speaker 5: strong army and navy and state. And the only way
Speaker 5: we can afford that is if we transition as quickly
Speaker 5: as possible to a manufacturing based economy, and that's not
Speaker 5: going to happen by following Adam Smith and letting the
Speaker 5: market do his think. We need to actually have a
Speaker 5: plan that can help push this transition. At first, Hamilton
Speaker 5: is not particularly concerned with economics. He's writing about democracy
Speaker 5: and all that. When fighting begins, he organizes an artillery
Speaker 5: company and he serves for about a year on the
Speaker 5: front lines. And because he's so brilliant and good at
Speaker 5: what he does, he's receiving these offers from generals to
Speaker 5: join their staffs, and he holds out until Washington offers
Speaker 5: him a place on his quote unquote family with just
Speaker 5: to say, his staff. So then Hamilton transitions to the
Speaker 5: role of a kind of military planner, and he has
Speaker 5: an overall view of the war, and what he sees
Speaker 5: is one total dysfunction at the level of politics because
Speaker 5: the colonies are not properly united under the Articles of Confederation,
Speaker 5: which is just a loose security pact, and each colony
Speaker 5: is essentially a sovereign state, and so there's a continental
Speaker 5: Army which answers to Congress, but there are also these
Speaker 5: malicious state militias, and so states would send aid to
Speaker 5: the Continental Army and put provisions on say like this
Speaker 5: clothing is for the Pennsylvania line, you know, please don't
Speaker 5: distribute this weaponry to whatever the New England line, this
Speaker 5: kind of stuff. Congress had no means of taxing, so
Speaker 5: Hamilton is viewing all of this from this kind of
Speaker 5: archimedean bird'seye view on Washington's staff.
Speaker 3: So one of the things that comes through in your book,
Speaker 3: and again like, I don't know much about this, but
Speaker 3: I didn't realize how much of a basket case the
Speaker 3: Revolutionary War kind of was, and how disorganized in some
Speaker 3: respects and just terrible physical conditions. So you write about how,
Speaker 3: you know, there were soldiers who rebelled because they weren't
Speaker 3: getting paid because there were no taxes, so the federal government,
Speaker 3: which didn't really exist, could not pay them, and also
Speaker 3: how soldiers had to be let loose in the forests
Speaker 3: to like slaughter wild pigs because they didn't have enough
Speaker 3: food supply and things like that. It very much seems
Speaker 3: to highlight the idea or the importance of the role
Speaker 3: of the supply chain and physical real goods in military conflict.
Speaker 3: And I guess by extension in government.
Speaker 5: Absolutely and I think many of US labor under a
Speaker 5: misapprehension that the Revolutionary War was a guerrilla war and
Speaker 5: that the patriots were living off the land and you know,
Speaker 5: taking potshots of the.
Speaker 2: British from I was an elementary school ar.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's how I learned it. But actually it was
Speaker 5: a conventional war, which is say, very expensive, and most
Speaker 5: of the conflicts were forceaw on force with these long
Speaker 5: supply chains. You know, everything had to be provided to
Speaker 5: these armies. Salt, for example, somethings as mundane AsSalt. This
Speaker 5: was extremely important. As one old article put it said,
Speaker 5: salt was as important to the Revolutionary War armies as
Speaker 5: gasoline was to the armies of nineteen forty five. If
Speaker 5: you didn't have salt for the animals, they would very
Speaker 5: quickly get weak and couldn't function. You had to cure
Speaker 5: food with salt, so salt was essential. There really wasn't
Speaker 5: a salt industry in the colonies because one of the
Speaker 5: few things that the British Navigation Acts, one of the
Speaker 5: weird little kind of wrinkles in them, was that they
Speaker 5: allowed ships coming from Europe to fill their hulls for
Speaker 5: ballast with French salt. So there was this flow of
Speaker 5: relatively cheap, high quality salt into the colonies. So the
Speaker 5: colonies didn't actually have much of a industry. So during
Speaker 5: the war that's cut off, so they have to start
Speaker 5: developing AsSalt industry. They've got these, like you know, anemic
Speaker 5: little foundries, one down in Virginia, some up in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 5: They have to start building all this up as the
Speaker 5: war is going on. And even though there were these
Speaker 5: long supply lines, things were so harsh that there was
Speaker 5: also what they called the Grand Forage that soldiers would
Speaker 5: go out to requisition and nominally purchase supplies. But they're
Speaker 5: doing this with a series of increasingly worthless scripts. At
Speaker 5: first you have the Continental dollar, which the British are
Speaker 5: also counterfeiting, and then they just overproduce Continental dollars so
Speaker 5: that they're worthless. Then they create this IOU system called
Speaker 5: Piris's notes, which turned into another kind of paper currency.
Speaker 5: But these requisition squads would go out into the countryside
Speaker 5: and say to farmers like, well, you know, if you
Speaker 5: support the cause, we're here to buy with this worthless money,
Speaker 5: you know whatever, ten percent of your produce, your half
Speaker 5: your chickens, whatever. If you refused, and they said, well,
Speaker 5: you're a loyalist, you're against our call, so we're just
Speaker 5: going to confiscate everything. So they're pushing all of this
Speaker 5: paper currency, which during the war leads to inflation, and
Speaker 5: then there's a big crash after the war. So it's
Speaker 5: totally chaotic, and the scale of some of these operations
Speaker 5: is nuts. There was a campaign in seventeen seventy nine
Speaker 5: against the Iroquois, who had mostly sided with the British,
Speaker 5: and it involved damming a river, building a road to
Speaker 5: the river, building a fleet of boats to go down
Speaker 5: the river, and then blowing this dam and riding this
Speaker 5: wave of water down river to then launch on this
Speaker 5: expedition against the Iroquois. So capital intensive, labor intensive, big
Speaker 5: economic endeavor.
Speaker 2: So one of the things that's interesting these days is,
Speaker 2: you know, people have talked for years in the US,
Speaker 2: like we need to revive domestic manufacturing. It's is one
Speaker 2: of those things that gets said what seems to help
Speaker 2: get the voats over the line to actually do endeavors,
Speaker 2: even when it comes to something like climate is the
Speaker 2: idea of existential national security threat. We have to compete
Speaker 2: against China, right, Like, that's how it's framed. And when
Speaker 2: there's the rivalry with China as the framing, then that
Speaker 2: opens the door for vote. And it sounds like, and
Speaker 2: you talk about this in your book that ultimately it
Speaker 2: was the same that that at the end, it's like,
Speaker 2: there is no sovereign US without manufacturing. Yes, that we
Speaker 2: can't maintain our independence even if we win it without manufacturing.
Speaker 5: That was Hamilton's insight that this independence would be totally
Speaker 5: illusory if it was not backed up with material force,
Speaker 5: and that material force was going to be expensive, and
Speaker 5: that required an economic transformation, an industrialization program. But they
Speaker 5: didn't use that word. They talked about manufacturers. So that's
Speaker 5: what he sets out to do. And amidst the war,
Speaker 5: he has a kind of what seems to be a
Speaker 5: mental breakdown. He goes in't this nervous fever during the
Speaker 5: winter when they're all at Valley Forge and there's a
Speaker 5: number of generals going rogue and he's sent up to like,
Speaker 5: you know, reimpose order, and then he has this crazy breakdown,
Speaker 5: and after that his writing is really different. He begins
Speaker 5: a series of letters to elites outlining the need for
Speaker 5: constitutional convention and an economic plan. And so the rest
Speaker 5: of his life is that. And it should be said
Speaker 5: that the war ends in seventeen eighty three. There are
Speaker 5: rebellions like increasing in the ranks, mutinies, culminating with a
Speaker 5: mutiny by officers in Newburgh, New York, which is often
Speaker 5: misrepresented as if these guys are all greedy and trying
Speaker 5: to you know, you know, have some crupdetas, but they
Speaker 5: are suffering like their men. I mean, they have boots
Speaker 5: that some of their men are shoeless, but it's like
Speaker 5: they had really suffered and they were demanding from Congress
Speaker 5: some resources. After the war beginning in you know, the
Speaker 5: fighting kind of winds down around seventeen eighty, but the
Speaker 5: Treaty of Paris isn't until seventeen eighty three, and there
Speaker 5: then begins was called the Critical Peer, which is a
Speaker 5: period in which the United States is still governed by
Speaker 5: the Articles of Confederation, and all sorts of serious economic
Speaker 5: and political and even military problems begin to happen. There's
Speaker 5: a trade war between New Jersey and New York, and
Speaker 5: New York and Connecticut. Maryland and Virginia are having similar
Speaker 5: trade wars. On the Chesapeak, there's conflict with Maroon communities
Speaker 5: self emancipated formally enslaved people, some of whom had served
Speaker 5: with the British Army, who have these autonomous communities. On
Speaker 5: the board of South Carolina and Georgia, there's increasing conflict
Speaker 5: with Native Americans. In what's now Kentucky. There's conflict between
Speaker 5: groups of white settlers and their speculative land backers, like
Speaker 5: these two competing factions in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania,
Speaker 5: which turns into a shooting war in which people are
Speaker 5: being killed and homes are burned. And then all of
Speaker 5: this culminates with Shay's rebellion in seventeen eighty six in
Speaker 5: western Massachusetts. And all of these states had gone heavily
Speaker 5: into debt during the war, and many of those IOUs
Speaker 5: that I mentioned earlier were bought up at pennies on
Speaker 5: the dollar used to be their face value by speculators.
Speaker 5: And in Massachusetts, thirty five people owned almost half of
Speaker 5: all of the state's debt, and Congress is making these
Speaker 5: requests and seventeen eighty four there's this massive requisition request,
Speaker 5: which by seventeen eighty six is really hurting people on
Speaker 5: the ground. And so this request for a tax take
Speaker 5: from Congress is part of what's pushing Massachusetts to shake
Speaker 5: down its farmers. There's also, interestingly, a series of volcanic eruptions,
Speaker 5: one in Iceland and one in Japan.
Speaker 3: Which affected the growing season.
Speaker 5: Right. Yeah, there's a really really cold summers and floods
Speaker 5: knocking out crops and barns. So all this is happening. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And so amidst this, through this massive wave of foreclosures
Speaker 5: in Massachusetts and also in New Hampshire and other parts
Speaker 5: of New England. But in Massachusetts this coalesces into an
Speaker 5: actual armed rebellion led by veterans of the Revolutionary War,
Speaker 5: in particular Daniel Shayes. The Schaiesites didn't call themselves Shaysites.
Speaker 5: They call themselves regulators. And what they did was they
Speaker 5: just closed down the courts and the militia was called
Speaker 5: up to put an end to this, and the militia
Speaker 5: would switch sides or refuse to fight, or just melt away.
Speaker 5: So the coastal elites, who owned all the debt that
Speaker 5: they were trying to collect on by foreclosing on these farms,
Speaker 5: create a private army. They take up a subscription of
Speaker 5: a private army, and there's actually a series of force
Speaker 5: on force battles with cannons, and the Shazites are defeated
Speaker 5: in the early spring winter of seventeen eighty seven. And
Speaker 5: it's in response to that crisis that the Constitutional Convention
Speaker 5: happens in Philadelphia.
Speaker 3: There's literally like this, this is Hamilton. This is what
Speaker 3: Joe said, Hamilton, the musical one, right, right, Okay, So
Speaker 3: can I just ask you You can kind of see
Speaker 3: why Hamilton would make the argument that the US, such
Speaker 3: as it was at that time, needs to develop industrially,
Speaker 3: build out manufacturing capacity, create a strong system of government,
Speaker 3: and things like that. But one thing I don't quite
Speaker 3: understand from that period is why was agrarianism seemingly so
Speaker 3: well regarded. Because it's hard for me to even envision
Speaker 3: a time when there was this agrarian ideal because we're
Speaker 3: so used to talking about development, linear development of economies,
Speaker 3: you know, you move from farming to manufacturing to a
Speaker 3: service based economy. It's weird to think that at that
Speaker 3: time there was actually a number of people who said
Speaker 3: that agrarianism was the best economic system.
Speaker 5: Yes, at most famous among them Thomas Jefferson. Agrarianism was
Speaker 5: popular because that's what most people did. And Jefferson famously
Speaker 5: or infamously says in one correspondence that it would be
Speaker 5: better to leave manufacturing workshops in Europe because manufacturing brings
Speaker 5: with it a degradation of character, and that the farming
Speaker 5: classes are the most noble, and so it was a
Speaker 5: very romantic argument about national character. Underneath that, though, was
Speaker 5: also a very material concern with what it would mean
Speaker 5: for the slave South were the North where there was
Speaker 5: at this point at the end of the Revolution, that
Speaker 5: slavery has been outlawed in Massachusetts, it's been outlawed in Vermont,
Speaker 5: which is not yet actually a state. It's on the
Speaker 5: way to being outlawed in Pennsylvania and New York. That'll
Speaker 5: take a couple more decades. But this so other elite
Speaker 5: can see the writing on the wall that their system
Speaker 5: is unpopular, and if the North becomes more populous and wealthier,
Speaker 5: then it would dominate the federal government. This was their
Speaker 5: fear and then perhaps come after their property. And that
Speaker 5: is indeed what happened. And part of what drove that
Speaker 5: northern hostility to slavery was humanitarian. It was like a
Speaker 5: religious kind of humanitarian sensibility, but there was also an
Speaker 5: element of self interest. Northern farmers were really worried that
Speaker 5: this system would crowd them out of western lands and
Speaker 5: that it might extend to the north. They did not think, oh,
Speaker 5: slavery is naturally limited to grarian work on continent tobacco
Speaker 5: in the south. They were worried that the workers of
Speaker 5: the North could also be enslaved. That's sort of just
Speaker 5: emerging at the time of the revolution, so anyway, so
Speaker 5: that's part of what is motivating Jefferson's hostility initially to manufacturing,
Speaker 5: and this is romanticization of the agrarian character. Also that
Speaker 5: they don't want the northern states to get too powerful,
Speaker 5: and so the Constitution actually involves all sorts of compromises
Speaker 5: to compensate for the fact that that's very likely to happen.
Speaker 5: The Senate being one of those important compromises where every
Speaker 5: state gets to senators, and the Southern elites dominated the
Speaker 5: Senate for a very long time, and it should be
Speaker 5: set up until the Civil War, the richest people in
Speaker 5: the country were always Southern elites, even though the South
Speaker 5: was generally impoverished, and even to this day, the southeast
Speaker 5: of the US bears the marks of underdevelopment in terms
Speaker 5: of numerous indicators of well being, rates of interpersonal violence,
Speaker 5: early death, all this kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: What did industrial policy which again I know they didn't
Speaker 2: call it that at the time, but like to Hamilton,
Speaker 2: what did it look like? Specifically, what should the federal
Speaker 2: government be empowered to do? How should it make those decisions? Like, okay,
Speaker 2: it's all philosophically, he criticized Edwin Smith. He saw reasons
Speaker 2: on the around why there needed to be a strong
Speaker 2: state develop that. What does that look like in practice
Speaker 2: in terms of actual policy choices made by the government
Speaker 2: to foster these industries.
Speaker 5: Well, all that is laid out in the Report on
Speaker 5: the subjects of Manufacturers, and he calls the things that
Speaker 5: the federal government should do the means proper. It should
Speaker 5: also be said that the Report on Manufacturers is the
Speaker 5: first time the word capitalists is used in the English language.
Speaker 3: I was amazed to read that, So you said, the
Speaker 3: first published mention of the word capitalists.
Speaker 5: As far as I can tell, Yeah, it had been
Speaker 5: used in French earlier, but that was the first time
Speaker 5: it's in English. So the means proper for Hamilton involve tariffs,
Speaker 5: prohibitive taxes on imports so as to defend infant industries
Speaker 5: as they would later be called. Hamilton calls them infant manufacturers,
Speaker 5: but also drawbacks from those tariffs subsidies for specific firms
Speaker 5: that need help, Bans on exports of strategic raw materials,
Speaker 5: investment in physical infrastructure, investment in planning and in R
Speaker 5: and D, research and development, and general education. And ultimately
Speaker 5: he wanted to have a planning board, something like the
Speaker 5: Japanese Ministry of Industry and Technology. That never came to truition,
Speaker 5: but he lays out in tremendous detail basically the means
Speaker 5: proper this toolbox for economic planning, and the standard story
Speaker 5: is that it was shot down. He even opens the
Speaker 5: doors the idea of public ownership. He also more well known,
Speaker 5: of course, and before pitching the manufacturing plan, he creates
Speaker 5: the credit system. Right, He creates the first Bank of
Speaker 5: the United States, and the standard story is that, well
Speaker 5: it came to nothing, but actually a bunch of it
Speaker 5: was passed, and over time, more and more of what
Speaker 5: Hamilton outlined in the Reporter Manufacturers is implemented, and it's
Speaker 5: often implemented in moments of crises, because frequently what happens
Speaker 5: is the free marketeers win the argument there isn't sufficient taxation,
Speaker 5: there isn't sufficient regulation, and then there's an economic crash
Speaker 5: and a crisis in which planning is sort of spontaneously
Speaker 5: summoned in to clean up the mess. So in the
Speaker 5: long run, the report on the subject of manufacturers really
Speaker 5: does triumph and does guide American industrialization and was also
Speaker 5: very influential on other industrialization processes.
Speaker 3: Can you talk about the relationship between Hamilton's vision of
Speaker 3: industrial policy and again he doesn't use that term, but
Speaker 3: the means proper and I guess how it's financed because
Speaker 3: he seems to make And obviously this is where I
Speaker 3: think a lot of what we're seeing from the Biden
Speaker 3: administration now tends to get a little bit controversial because
Speaker 3: people say like, oh, well, we're building all this stuff.
Speaker 3: But also the public debt has absolutely exploded. What did
Speaker 3: Hamilton say about that aspect of it? And one thing
Speaker 3: that I was kind of thinking is he talks, or
Speaker 3: he seems to talk a lot about external financing, so
Speaker 3: building up state credibility in order to convince creditors to
Speaker 3: give you money so that you can fund all these projects.
Speaker 3: And when I think about that, in addition to some
Speaker 3: of the tariffs and bounties and subsidies that he was
Speaker 3: talking about, I don't want to say beggar thy neighbor policies,
Speaker 3: but like you start to think about, well, why would
Speaker 3: these other countries fund American development? And also can everyone
Speaker 3: pursue these type of policies all at once? Can everyone
Speaker 3: draw on external debt in order to develop their own economies?
Speaker 5: Well, taking the first part first, so what Hamilton does
Speaker 5: is all the states have debt, and so when he
Speaker 5: is Treasury secretary, he's the first Treasury secretaryunder Washington, he
Speaker 5: pursues assumption of the state debts, as it's called, so
Speaker 5: that the federal government will buy up at face value
Speaker 5: all these state debts, which will help reinflate with the
Speaker 5: state economies and liberate the state governments from this debt.
Speaker 5: But in exchange, the states have to hand over their
Speaker 5: western land claims, and many states didn't have a western boundary.
Speaker 5: It was just like, and you know the western boundary.
Speaker 3: Of Virginia is it's somewhere in that direction.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we haven't been to the Pacific yet, but it's
Speaker 5: like out there as far as we go. I didn't
Speaker 5: realize that. Yeah, And so getting all of that land
Speaker 5: and federalizing it is also very important part of the
Speaker 5: toolbox for American industrialization. So the way Hamilton pays for
Speaker 5: the debt is by taking a loan in Europe and
Speaker 5: he offers four percent interests when most European debt is
Speaker 5: offering three percent interest And there's a debate at the
Speaker 5: time about whether or not the debt should just be
Speaker 5: paid off, and Hamilton says, no, no, we.
Speaker 4: Need to You know, this is a roll it over.
Speaker 3: Essentially, you want to keep borrowing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, what he calls a funded debt. So this is
Speaker 5: what happens. And part of this is also about keeping
Speaker 5: your enemies close. He doesn't want the speculator class to
Speaker 5: turn on the state and attack it and undermine it.
Speaker 5: He wants to deal them in. And critics say, oh, well,
Speaker 5: see he was just a servant of these elites, and
Speaker 5: it's like, well, yeah, he was, you know, helping their interests.
Speaker 5: But he also was concerned very pragmatically about having this
Speaker 5: class of speculators turn against the state, and so he
Speaker 5: wanted them to be committed to state stability, because I
Speaker 5: should say he's very explicit about the risk of the
Speaker 5: country fragmenting and falling part and disintegrating into civil war,
Speaker 5: which you know it does to some extent due to
Speaker 5: the power of states. So Hamilton was very opposed to
Speaker 5: state power anyway, so that's part of how he funds it.
Speaker 5: And then also so prior to the Washington administration, states
Speaker 5: had their own rules and generally the tariff was around
Speaker 5: eight percent. After Hamilton's plans go through, it's about thirteen percent.
Speaker 5: The interesting thing is that the overall tax burden actually
Speaker 5: goes down.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I actually I made a note of this because I
Speaker 3: thought it was really interesting. And again, I think when
Speaker 3: people think about like public infrastructure building and industrial policy nowadays,
Speaker 3: they think like, oh, my taxes will go up. But
Speaker 3: in this particular instance, I think they fell seventy seven
Speaker 3: percent from seventeen eighty five to seventeen eighty eight.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And I mean that's partly because there wasn't this
Speaker 5: insane effort to just pay off all the debts, and
Speaker 5: also because there are productive investments being made. Another crucial
Speaker 5: piece of this toolbox is actually the post office.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that was really interesting to me about this.
Speaker 5: So in the postal clause, my favorite clause in the constitution,
Speaker 5: Article one, section eight of the Constitution is very often overlooked,
Speaker 5: and that explains what the government can do. Most constitutional
Speaker 5: scholarship focuses on how the government works, the divided government
Speaker 5: different branches, but what does this government allow itself to
Speaker 5: do is rarely explored. And so Article one, section eight
Speaker 5: is where that is laid out. That's what Congress can do.
Speaker 5: And there's a debate around the postal clause. Benjamin Franklin
Speaker 5: and Hamilton and other Federalists as they were called, they
Speaker 5: wanted to empower the federal government to build canals because
Speaker 5: they needed transportation infrastructure, and that is opposed by primarily Southerners.
Speaker 5: As is later said some decades afterwards, when the question
Speaker 5: of canals, federally funded canals again comes up, Daniel Macon,
Speaker 5: a congressman from Georgia, answers a young local politician who
Speaker 5: asked him. He says, how come we're opposed to the
Speaker 5: federal funding of canals? And Macon says, if we allow
Speaker 5: Congress to fund canals, they will no sooner and with
Speaker 5: more propriety, soon be after our slaves. He doesn't say slaves,
Speaker 5: you know, some euphemism. So there was again this concern.
Speaker 5: You know, the more you empower the federal government, the
Speaker 5: greater the risk to slavery. So there is no mention
Speaker 5: of canals. However, the postal clause says that the Post
Speaker 5: Office has the right to build post roads, and that
Speaker 5: little thing roads, well, you know, by the eighteen twenties
Speaker 5: most rivers were declared post roads, and the post Office
Speaker 5: becomes a massive public works agency. We think of rivers
Speaker 5: as passive natural features, but they required enormous amounts of
Speaker 5: transformation to be economically useful, and it was the Post
Speaker 5: Office that did that, hiring contractors, for example, on the
Speaker 5: Red River which runs up through Arkansas. This is, you know,
Speaker 5: after Hamilton's time, but these are the effects of Hamilton's
Speaker 5: work playing out. There was a one hundred mile long
Speaker 5: snake infested log jam called the Raft, and it blocked
Speaker 5: settlement of Arkansas and Missouri, and it was the federal government,
Speaker 5: i the Post Office that went in and cleared that.
Speaker 5: And so the Post Office built the vast majority of
Speaker 5: roads and that lower transportation costs that knit together a
Speaker 5: national economy. It also subsidized business communications and the press
Speaker 5: and an enormous amount to create a national market.
Speaker 2: That's incredibly interesting. And up until you talked about the book,
Speaker 2: I had not realized the sort of the developmental role
Speaker 2: for the Post Office. But I'm glad you said that
Speaker 2: thing about the young congressman. Why do we oppose the
Speaker 2: allowing the federal government to have this role in the
Speaker 2: building of canals? And you know, there was concerns that
Speaker 2: the abolition movement was going to rise in their way
Speaker 2: of life and their economic system was going to get
Speaker 2: destroyed by the advent of slavery.
Speaker 4: There still is a lot.
Speaker 2: Of opposition to the idea that the federal government can
Speaker 2: have a productive role to play in building out infrastructure
Speaker 2: or doing whatever the equivalent is of building out a
Speaker 2: canal today. So are there deeper, strange or other sort
Speaker 2: of related ideas that you can draw between you know,
Speaker 2: the late seventeen hundreds and today, excluding slavery. Why people
Speaker 2: there's still like economic interests of like deep anxiety about
Speaker 2: the role of the federal government these things.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think persistent throughout American history is the fear
Speaker 5: of the slippery slope by the incumbent economic elites. And
Speaker 5: if the federal government is proposing transformations of any sort,
Speaker 5: there are always gonna be some interests that are threatened
Speaker 5: by that. And the other thing is it's expensive, and
Speaker 5: so no one really wants to pay taxes, and so
Speaker 5: industries and lobbies are constantly pushing to lower taxes. And
Speaker 5: so part of the argument for that is, don't spend
Speaker 5: the money, don't do these big projects. Just give us
Speaker 5: the money. Let us keep the money. These big projects
Speaker 5: are pointless, and we handle the money better.
Speaker 3: In the few minutes remaining, can you please defend industrial
Speaker 3: policy from every single criticism that has ever been made
Speaker 3: against it? No, But I am thinking back to Adam Smith,
Speaker 3: And you know, Adam Smith's argument was part one of security,
Speaker 3: the idea that trade would build relationships between countries, whereas
Speaker 3: Hamilton's argument, it seems, is centered on the development of
Speaker 3: the US the building of a strong state, and how
Speaker 3: those two are related to each other. So I guess
Speaker 3: number one, what does Hamiltonian style industrial policy actually mean
Speaker 3: for trade relationships between countries and the prospects for peace.
Speaker 3: But then also can you talk a little bit about
Speaker 3: arguments about well, government spending creates unproductive capacity, or it's
Speaker 3: unfair for governments to pick winners or losers. Again, I'm
Speaker 3: asking you to basically address all the critiques of industrial
Speaker 3: policy in the few minutes we have allotted to us.
Speaker 5: Well, the first thing I would say is it's not
Speaker 5: like industrial policy always works out. There are problems with it.
Speaker 5: It's not easy to do. However, if you look at
Speaker 5: the history of industrialization in one country after another, it
Speaker 5: does raise the standard of living and it generally works,
Speaker 5: but it always involves a development list activist state. So
Speaker 5: I don't think there's any escaping that now that can
Speaker 5: be done in better or worse ways. And the US
Speaker 5: plays an important role in that. These ideas from Hamilton
Speaker 5: goes to Frederick List, who goes to Germany, who then
Speaker 5: very influential on the Meiji restoration in Japan and Japan's
Speaker 5: industrialization and on and on to today. So in terms
Speaker 5: of I mean, I think that's the most important argument
Speaker 5: is that the actual story of industrialization always involves an
Speaker 5: activist state in terms of trade. I mean Hamilton was
Speaker 5: not opposed to trade. He just didn't want to be
Speaker 5: subordinated to this dominant power for British I mean, his
Speaker 5: concern with national sovereignty and industrial development didn't come at
Speaker 5: the expense of international trade. So almost always exports also
Speaker 5: play a very important part of industrialization. Take for example,
Speaker 5: a place like Rwanda. You know, Rwanda is very explicit,
Speaker 5: very kind of Hamiltonian. They say, look, if we don't
Speaker 5: have economic growth and development, we're going to have another genocide.
Speaker 5: We've had you know, four or five whatever it is, right,
Speaker 5: And they they're heavily dependent on exporting T. They don't
Speaker 5: want to not export T. But they've had conflicts with
Speaker 5: the IMF because they want to run a three percent
Speaker 5: budget deficit so that they can fund public education all
Speaker 5: the way you know, through K through twelve. And they say, look,
Speaker 5: if we don't have if our farmers are all illiterate,
Speaker 5: we can't increase productivity and we can't develop. So I'm
Speaker 5: speaking to the industrialization rather than industrial policy. Like what
Speaker 5: we're dealing with here in the US is something new,
Speaker 5: which is kind of like the question of reindustrialization. And
Speaker 5: you know that's actually a very different problem in project.
Speaker 4: The book is written to the left.
Speaker 2: What did you feel the need for like this particular
Speaker 2: audience to read this particular history.
Speaker 5: Well, there's a hostility, I think to the US projects
Speaker 5: on the left that is not helpful. And there's also
Speaker 5: a misunderstanding of the Constitution. I mean, people right off
Speaker 5: the Constitution as a document written by slaveholders. And I
Speaker 5: was struck in getting into this, getting under the hood
Speaker 5: about how many progressive elements there are in the American
Speaker 5: constitutional tradition. And I came away from this project with
Speaker 5: a much deeper appreciation and respect for that. And I
Speaker 5: wanted to disabuse leftists who fall into these sort of
Speaker 5: fascil notions about the Constitution being bad. I disagree with that,
Speaker 5: and I think there's actually a lot of room for
Speaker 5: quote unquote progressive goals to be met through the Constitution.
Speaker 5: The general Welfare clause, which Thomas Jefferson freaked out about
Speaker 5: and he didn't like. He said, this could mean almost anything.
Speaker 5: It's like, yes, it opens the door to all types
Speaker 5: of egalitarian projects potentially.
Speaker 3: I have one more thing, which is again when I
Speaker 3: think about Hamilton's experience versus what's happening today. One of
Speaker 3: the things I think about is that, as you said,
Speaker 3: a lot of what he recommended didn't immediately come to fruition.
Speaker 3: People like Jefferson stood in the way. Nowadays, there seems
Speaker 3: to be you know, a sort of similar back and
Speaker 3: forth with in DC. But how do you build political
Speaker 3: consensus for this type of policy, because that really seems
Speaker 3: to have been the challenge for Hamilton. It happened over
Speaker 3: time to some degree, but it certainly didn't happen immediately.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, you know, I don't know how you build
Speaker 5: political consensus around it. You don't do it by not
Speaker 5: admitting any fault and not having conversations. So I cannot
Speaker 5: tell you how political consent can be built.
Speaker 3: You have to write a whole other book about that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, and there are you know, well, you guys,
Speaker 5: I just listened to a podcast you do with some
Speaker 5: Irish guy about you know, the EU policies. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's like, it's not like there aren't problems with these
Speaker 5: agendas and those have to be acknowledged and those blockages removed.
Speaker 2: This was gonna say, Tracy, when you said that, like Oh,
Speaker 2: it seems so quaint that people were like skeptical of
Speaker 2: the era of economic no trajectory.
Speaker 4: We just did this episode.
Speaker 3: No, I know, I know, I know, but like if
Speaker 3: you read the book, like the idealization of agrarianism is
Speaker 3: just like very surprising to me, especially because you think
Speaker 3: back to the late seventeen hundreds and you don't think
Speaker 3: that like subsistence farming was a particularly glamorous activity. But
Speaker 3: then again, as Christian was pointing out, there's all this
Speaker 3: like idealism and values attached to the hard work of
Speaker 3: being a farmer.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that too, yeah, and it did provide autonomy
Speaker 5: for yeoman farmers, and so there were legitimate concerns about
Speaker 5: the loss of that autonomy.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: One final argument for industrial planning for gument intervention is
Speaker 5: that it is as Carl Polani says, laissez fair free
Speaker 5: trade was planned, and planning is spontaneous because the pattern,
Speaker 5: again and again is that the forces that want free
Speaker 5: market advocate for that, they get deregulation, they get tax cuts,
Speaker 5: and that inevitably to a crash in which the government
Speaker 5: has to step in and regulate and nationalize. And we
Speaker 5: just lived through that with two thousand and eight, right,
Speaker 5: I mean you had an entire generation of bankers and
Speaker 5: policy experts who had argued against government intervention, and when
Speaker 5: two thousand and eight came, what did they do. They
Speaker 5: basically nationalized the US banking system for a number of
Speaker 5: years and bailed the whole thing out. So another argument
Speaker 5: for industrial policy is that government intervention in the capitalist
Speaker 5: economy is inevitable. It's going to either happen ad hoc
Speaker 5: during an emergency, or it can happen consciously through democratic deliberation.
Speaker 2: Christian PRENTI, thank you so much for coming on. Everyone
Speaker 2: go read the book. And also, there are a number
Speaker 2: of just extraordinary interesting people at your department at John Jay.
Speaker 2: I'm in a band with one of the professors. I
Speaker 2: play music with your colleague, Thomas Herndon. Yeah, a number
Speaker 2: of smart people there, and it's a really interesting program.
Speaker 5: Here in New York. Great masters program.
Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you very much, Thank you, Tracy.
Speaker 2: I really enjoyed that conversation, even sitting aside sort of
Speaker 2: some of the economic lessons, just sort of like revisiting
Speaker 2: some of the assumptions we make about the history of
Speaker 2: that time and what it was actually like. I find
Speaker 2: to be very useful.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, we didn't even really get into this,
Speaker 3: but there was also I think an instance of price
Speaker 3: controls immediately after the Revolutionary War. We're going to have
Speaker 3: to do like a whole other hour on this with Christian.
Speaker 4: Yeah, we should.
Speaker 2: You know, there's another interesting thing, and I meant to
Speaker 2: ask a question about it, but I'm aware that there
Speaker 2: is a thing in America in history called the War
Speaker 2: of eighteen twelve, and I almost know nothing about it.
Speaker 4: I certainly was not.
Speaker 2: I think they set the White House on fire, for
Speaker 2: that's all I know. But in the book, there's a
Speaker 2: lot in there about the basically insufficiency of the USNSH
Speaker 2: defense at that point, born in part due to poor
Speaker 2: domestic investment that allowed us to be in a situation
Speaker 2: where the British could you destroy Washington, DC.
Speaker 3: You know, it's funny. I didn't study or hear that
Speaker 3: much about the Revolutionary War, but when I went to
Speaker 3: university in London, there sure was a lot of talk
Speaker 3: in my international history class about the War of eighteen
Speaker 3: or twelve.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I literally realized I know very little about it, and
Speaker 2: I don't think it gets talked about very much.
Speaker 3: I was waiting for you to drop the idea of
Speaker 3: Hamilton being a secret MMT.
Speaker 2: Or clearly I mean, come on, no, but it is
Speaker 2: really interesting and I you know, this idea of like
Speaker 2: that there were ways in the US Constitution, And I
Speaker 2: thought that was a really interesting point that like embedded
Speaker 2: in the Constitution are these various clauses and comments or
Speaker 2: lines that really do open up a lot of like
Speaker 2: space for active economic power from the government.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I also thought the point about well not just dismissing
Speaker 3: the some of the negativities that can go with industrial
Speaker 3: policy is really important because if you're gonna you know,
Speaker 3: you can do it, you can also do it wrong
Speaker 3: to Christian's point, and there are plenty of examples throughout
Speaker 3: world history of things kind of going off the rails
Speaker 3: and stuff like that. But you need to have a
Speaker 3: reasonable and honest discussion about the pros and cons and
Speaker 3: the goals of the policy as well, what exactly you're
Speaker 3: trying to do here and what the results are that
Speaker 3: you want to see. It can't just be like throw
Speaker 3: money at every single problem. You have to have some
Speaker 3: specificity about what you're trying to achieve.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and that's so fascinating because I knew that about
Speaker 2: like Friedrich List and the industrialization of Germany and the
Speaker 2: influence that his work in Germany then had on Japan.
Speaker 2: But the fact that his work actually justin Hamilton, the
Speaker 2: fact that Hamilton was the first to write the word
Speaker 2: capitalist in the English language, pretty fascinating history.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely, shall we leave it there.
Speaker 5: Let's leave it there.
Speaker 3: This has been another episode of the Odd Thoughts podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 2: And I'm joe Y and Thal you can follow me
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