How best to bring back manufacturing

Attitudes to manufacturing were a small but telling split in the cold war. The Soviet Union had such a focus on industry that its statisticians kept services from the country’s measure of national income. A year after the conflict ended, Michael Boskin, then the White House’s chief economist, is said to have joked it did not matter whether the “chips” America produced were made from semiconductors or potatoes. There are echoes in the present geopolitical face-off. Xi Jinping, China’s president, is so focused on hard tech that he has cracked down on consumer-tech firms.