Friday Grab Bag: Taking industrial policy seriously

Plus what I learned about Jamaican parking rules on vacation

We are back from a refreshing trip to Jamaica, which also offered an opportunity to revisit Rasheed Griffith’s February piece “Jamaica is Not Doing Okay” taking a skeptical look at recent economic trends on the island. It’s a great article and in general I wish Americans paid more attention to economic development questions in the Western Hemisphere because these things actually have large impacts on events in the United States in a way that sexier issues in the Middle East don’t.

I don’t have any great insights into the deeper structural problems of the country, but something I noticed during even brief moments off the resort grounds is that the non-slum built environment in Jamaica looks a lot like recently built American suburbs, even though it’s a dramatically poorer country. Pondering that, I thought it kinda made sense. It’s a pretty small country. It’s Anglophone. It’s near the United States. So there’s probably a lot of ambient cultural influence, and it sort of makes sense that you might build a new strip mall that wouldn’t be out of place in the I-10 corridor.

But could that possibly be right? Jamaica is way poorer than the United States. You could see that the resort staff mostly doesn’t have cars that they drive to work. Incentives matter, and a country with much lower rates of car ownership than the United States should have less parking at their retail outlets. Could it be that it’s not the architects who are thoughtlessly copying the American suburbs but the regulators? Lo and behold, yes — Jamaica imposes American-style mandatory parking minimums.

I am against this sort of thing in the United States, but realistically, under American conditions, market demand for parking is high in most circumstances so the regulations don’t create that large a distortion. But Jamaica only has 55 cars per 1,000 people! Parking minimums under those circumstances are a big source of pointless added expense.

Some other reading recommendations: Jeff Maurer on the Weather Underground, Joey Politano on California’s falling share of tech jobs, and David Klion’s profile of Will Stancil (hilariously, I believe there are two other national media Stancil profiles in the works).

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The big good news of the week is that aid to Ukraine is now flowing again. But also: American bridges are getting safer, we may be able to use plasma irradiation to repair broken bones faster, maternal mortality has halved over the past 35 years, the Black/white employment gap has vanished, vaccines have saved the lives of over 100 million infants, and the FTC is going to ban non-competes (though I wonder if this will hold up in court).

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John Crespi’s comment on the homework issue got a nearly unprecedented number of likes and I think is very insightful:

Professor talking here. My particular bee in my bonnet that contributes to this is the required end of term teaching evaluations. Instead of judging quality of instruction by, say, measuring how much students learn in a class, departments judge me by how much my students say they like me. It's like a baking contest where instead of tasting the finished cake we ask whether the flour and eggs enjoyed the process. We do need feedback, but we never really judge whether the student actually learned what was on the syllabus. One of my colleagues had the lowest dept evals and students complained how boring he was, but as his class was a pre-req to mine, I noticed his students knew their stuff compared to the popular prof's.

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And now, this week’s reader question:

Matt K: I have deep concerns that our country is hollowed out from a critical resources and production standpoint—of genuine national security concern—especially when considering an actual hot conflict. I contend we should nationalize or subsidize industries that are critical to our success and sovereignty if the private sector will not naturally retain or grow these production capacities and competencies. Confirm or allay my fears.

Examples: Few chips are made here, though we are trying to change that; Boeing is a shell of a once-great company; WuXi manufactures key drugs and is the background to bio pharmaceutical innovation; US Steel is potentially going to be owned by friendly but foreign country.

I think that this is a serious issue, so serious in fact that one of my big complaints is that the people raising the issue tend not to take it seriously enough.

The US Steel situation is a great example, but let’s start with something simpler.