Review of Losing Time: The Industrial Policy Debate, by Otis L. Graham, Jr.

Abstract

Otis Graham's Losing Time is an ode, in three parts, to industrial policy. In the first part, Graham reviews the U.S. "industrial policy" debate of the early 1980s, culminating in Congress's 1984 decision against national industrial planning, which was reinforced by Reagan's landslide second-term victory. Graham points out that nowadays most other countries have industrial policies state planning for sectoral growth coupled with public incentives for targeted sectors and argues that the United States failed to adopt one in the 1980s in part because Reagan opposed planning and in part because of the lessons Americans took from history. Graham's special contribution is an analysis of how participants in the debate over industrial policy (IP) used, and misused, history to construct arguments.