Endpaper Articles

The term industrial policy has gone through many phases. First identified with trade protection in Latin America and later seen as the instrument propelling East Asian economies to success, it has either been reviled or espoused depending on time, place, and country circumstance. What seems new, however, is the increasing acceptance of industrial policies as a central element of the rich countries’ policy arsenal and the prospect that this will become the norm. Government actions during the recent global economic crisis may well make public intervention a permanent feature of future policy.

The greatest conceit of US social science is its belief that it is trying to study the human condition and its findings are universally applicable to all societies. The greatest blindness is its inability to understand how culture-bound it has become.

There is a part of our brain which firmly believes that disaster begets disaster. This intuition probably comes from daily life—for example, we see gambling misadventures lead to a job loss, a painful divorce, and so on. It is also natural to apply this dogma on a macro-level, and the current economic crisis is no exception. A chorus of doomsayers loudly predict that today’s economic ailments will usher in a dark “age of upheaval.” Not surprisingly, these pessimists rush to embrace the 1930s as the empirical centerpiece of their argument.

Two thousand eight is the twentieth anniversary of some events that many Mexicans would prefer to forget, though some individual Mexicans who participated in them will probably never be allowed to do so. The presidential elections of 1988 were heavily rigged, and incompetently at that. The official party had stage managed election results for years, but voter discontent in 1988 was so strong that the authorities needed the help of a spurious computer breakdown to produce results that they could live with.