America’s crumbling infrastructure has become a global laughingstock. A new government agency could fix it – here’s how.

America’s crumbling infrastructure has become a global laughingstock. A new government agency could fix it – here’s how.

In this week's episode of "Pitchfork Economics," co-host Nick Hanauer points out that the United States doesn't really have an industrial policy. Other nations intentionally establish suites of economic, regulatory, and fiscal policies which direct their industrial sectors into specific fields, focus manufacturing into new technologies, and discourage harmful corporate behavior such as environmentally unsound investments. Over the last 40 years, America's leaders have largely left the industrial sector alone to govern itself. 

That hands-off approach is responsible for some disastrous economic results for the United States. Case in point: Solar cells were created in the United States, and many of the world's leading solar power experts live here, but Hanauer says that "at some point it became staggeringly obvious" to Chinese leaders that cheap and abundant solar cells "would be enormously useful to the economy and the world, and that having a national competence and advantage in making them would be a good thing." They directed Chinese manufacturers toward "the goal of building scale and dominance in photovoltaic cells."

Here in the United States, our leaders either didn't grasp the growing importance of solar power in a world that was struggling to respond to climate change, or they simply believed that