On this episode, Dan Richards talks with Andrew Schrank, a professor of sociology and international and public affairs at the Watson School, about the legacy of President Biden’s industrial policy — what it achieved, what it failed to achieve, and its continued effect on America’s economy and society. They also explore how President Trump's efforts to shape American industry compare to President Biden’s, and how both administrations have challenged long-standing notions about the role that government should play in our economy.

Watch the video of this conversation on YouTube.

Read Andrew Schrank’s article “Can Industrial Policy Still Do Big Things?” in Issues in Science and Technology

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. It might feel like it was in another era, but it wasn't even four years ago that President Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS Act, his signature legislative achievements.

These two laws, combined with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, passed in Twenty Twenty-One, were supposed to reshape America's industry and economy in the decades to come. Since then, however, the effect of these bills and of Biden's broader efforts at what economists and policymakers call industrial policy has been called into question. So how should we think about President Biden's attempts at industrial policy?

What did they achieve? What did they fail to achieve? And what can they teach us about the role of government and public policy in shaping industry?

To help explore these questions, on this episode, we have Andrew Schrank, a Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs at the Watson School. Andrew, thanks so much for coming onto the podcast.

ANDREW SCHRANK: Thanks, Dan. I'm glad to be here.

DAN RICHARDS: To start, can we define industrial policy for listeners who might not be that familiar with the phrase?

ANDREW SCHRANK: Happy to do so. So I want to be clear. There's no consensus definition of the term, but I would think of it in terms of a series of tools aimed at a series of targets. The targets tend to be things like increased industrial output, productivity, employment. And the tools tend to be things like taxes, regulations, standards, certain public procurement policies, subsidies, and even public ownership of firms and enterprises.

DAN RICHARDS: And so what are some classic, textbook examples of industrial policy?

ANDREW SCHRANK: Well, let me give you a couple of examples, one from the United States and one from Japan. In the United States, you can think of Alexander Hamilton and his report on manufacturers, which was an effort to encourage the United States to build domestic industry so it would no longer be a primarily agricultural economy and dependent upon Britain for its manufactured goods. And Hamilton called for the use of tariffs and the use of a variety of other policy tools to build domestic industry in the United States, which is what we did for much of the 19th century. That would be one example of industrial policy.

Another, better known more recently, was Japan's Ministry of Trade and Industry, which coordinated industrial policy in Japan through much of the 20th century, oriented with similar goals, to turn Japan into an industrial powerhouse powered by companies like Nippon Steel or Toyota that have become very familiar today that rose to the top of the international hierarchy of manufacturing with strong government support.

DAN RICHARDS: So this was the government in Japan either instituting tariffs or using tax policy or using investment to build up these specific industries.

ANDREW SCHRANK: Exactly. And a variety of other more subtle measures coordinated out of a single-state agency known as MITI.

DAN RICHARDS: All right. Well, let's turn back to President Biden, because during his administration, there was a lot of talk that the policies they were advocating and the bills they passed marked a return to industrial policy, a revival of industrial policy in a way we haven't seen in this country in a long time. And some of these policies were out of the more traditional playbook that you've been describing.

Other aspects of these policies and these bills were a little more unorthodox. And likewise, while certain goals fit very traditionally in the industrial policy framework, a lot of what they were doing with these policies had additional goals that were outside of this traditional way of envisioning these types of policies. And maybe let's start there with the goals. So, what were the goals, or broadly defined, what were the types of goals that the Biden administration had when they were crafting these policies?

ANDREW SCHRANK: Sure. So if you look at this from 40,000 feet, I think you can think about each piece of legislation oriented toward a distinct goal. So the CHIPS Act was oriented toward the build out of the semiconductor industry in the United States. Semiconductor chips are frequently thought of as the oil of the 21st century. They're the input that goes into everything else.

And the US had become, in the 21st century, dependent upon imported semiconductors, primarily from Asia and particularly for leading edge chips, the chips that are at the cutting edge of the industry. And the Biden administration wanted to reduce that dependence, particularly in the wake of COVID and increasing geopolitical competition with China. That was the CHIPS Act.

The IRA-- the Inflation Reduction Act-- was more like a small scale Green New Deal. It was oriented toward increasing the domestic production, but also distribution of electric vehicles, retrofitting of buildings to be more energy efficient, the production and consumption of new energy-efficient appliances, and things of that nature. And the bipartisan infrastructure law was designed to improve infrastructure in the US, including things like mass transit that would also contribute to a green transition, things like broadband internet access that would help build out the 21st century online economy, and increase the quality of infrastructure and overcome the lagging infrastructure that we've seen in the US over decades now. So those were the nominal goals of Biden's industrial policy. But what I argue in the piece that you refer to is that there was a common thread that united them that is frequently missed by critics.

DAN RICHARDS: And what is that thread?

ANDREW SCHRANK: So the common thread, I argue, is that there was a predistributive element to these industrial policies.

DAN RICHARDS: So let's get into that. What is predistribution in the context of these policies?

ANDREW SCHRANK: So the best way to understand predistribution is to think about redistribution in the realm of social policy. And typically in the United States, when we think about government efforts to level the playing field, to reduce income inequality or wealth inequality, we think about redistribution, which occurs after taxes and transfers. The idea is that we let the economy do its thing. And then if we decide that the outcome of that thing is inequitable in a way that we as a society don't want, we will tax, say, the rich or corporations or what have you, and redistribute to lower income Americans in a way to level the playing field. That's redistribution.

Predistribution is a more novel concept. It's been made famous, so to speak, at least in my world, by a political scientist at Yale named Jacob Hacker. And the idea is that you can combat inequality before taxes and transfers through a number of predistributive measures that shape the income and wealth distribution long before you ever get to the tax- to tax day, to April 15. So an example of a predistributive policy would be something like the minimum wage that tried to mitigate inequality in the labor market.

There's something like collective bargaining rights. You can think about equal employment laws as predistributive policies. You can think about antitrust laws that try to mitigate the power of big business, open the door to more consumer advocacy, to small business, and things like that, as part of a more predistributive policy toolkit.

DAN RICHARDS: And so what were the ways that Biden's industrial policy were using predistribution?

ANDREW SCHRANK: So I want to be very clear. I don't know of anyone in the Biden administration who used that term. It's really more of a post-hoc effort to make sense of it on my part. But the Biden administration, I argued, drew upon at least four different measures to make sure that its industrial policies mitigated inequality rather than augmenting inequality.

Now, if you go back and you think about some of the classic examples of industrial policy to which I referred, they didn't really hardwire distributional concerns into the policy itself. There was an underlying philosophy of what's good for the US is good for Americans, to quote or paraphrase Charlie Wilson, the former CEO of General Motors. But there wasn't really an effort to think about, are these policies really going to redound to the benefit of the average American worker or consumer?

And what we've seen over the course of the past 50 years is inequality in the United States has spiked. And the Biden administration was deeply concerned with that inequality at the same time as it was concerned about distant supply chains for semiconductors or green transition or something like that. And what they did was they tried to mitigate the inequality through the industrial policy.

So one of these measures would be antitrust. Traditionally, antitrust measures have been thought of as almost inimical to industrial policy. If industrial policy was about building national champions, like Toyota or Peugeot and Renault in France, antitrust was about breaking them up and stimulating competition.

And so the Biden administration didn't think about antitrust as being inimical to industrial policy. They thought antitrust as being conducive to industrial policy. Their models were things like the antitrust suits against IBM and AT&T in the late 20th century.

And they said those lawsuits did not undermine American competitiveness in information technology. They actually spurred competitiveness in information technology by spawning the growth of lots and lots of startup firms that have jumpstarted IT in the 21st century. So to their mind, antitrust could be conducive to industrial policy and toward our goals in terms of industrial policy.

At the same time, that antitrust would protect the interests of consumers, of workers, of small business, et cetera. And therefore, they put a very strong antitrust team together at the FTC, at the Department of Justice, and did so in a way that collaborated, at least indirectly, with the industrial policy initiatives. That would be one way.

DAN RICHARDS: And I want to get to the others. But I also was wondering, maybe we could go right now into an interesting example you provide in the paper about how antitrust policy was used to help spur certain industrial goals. And one had to do with EV charging, like the charging of electric cars, which in other ways has received some criticism the way the Biden administration tried to promote that. But this was an interesting example. So could you expand on what you were out there.

ANDREW SCHRANK: Thanks, Dan. You'll remember in the Twenty Twenty-Four presidential campaign, one of Donald Trump's criticisms of the Biden administration was that they'd spent billions of dollars on EV charging stations. And very few of those charging stations actually were online by the time of the election.

DAN RICHARDS: A few hundred or something.

ANDREW SCHRANK: But what isn't really thought of as that before you spend a lot of money rolling out EV charging stations, you want to make sure that those charging stations all operate on the same charging standard. If you've got 15 different charging standards going on, you're going to have a very inefficient system of charging in the same way that if you had 15 different railroad gauges in the 19th century, you would have a very inefficient system of railroads, since you'd have to switch trains every time move from one city to the other.

DAN RICHARDS: And this is literally for people who don't use EVs, this is like the shape of the plug, the amount of electricity that's running through them. It's just can all cars use all plugs for charging.

ANDREW SCHRANK: Exactly. And until the Biden administration, there were two different competing charging standards in the United States, one of which was proprietary. And it was the Tesla charging standard.

And it was the second biggest EV manufacturer in the country. And it was the best charging stations in the country in terms of efficiency and a number of other criteria. But you couldn't use those charging stations if you were not driving a Tesla.

And what the Biden administration did was it said, Tesla could only access resources to build out their charging stations under the bipartisan infrastructure law if they opened up their charging standard to other manufacturers. That was the quid pro quo. Tesla agreed. And as a result, we've moved toward more flexible charging in the United States, akin to the way we move toward a uniform railroad gauge in the 19th century.

DAN RICHARDS: So even though they may be only were responsible for building a few hundred charging stations, they did enable more charging for more vehicles across the country in some way.

ANDREW SCHRANK: Yeah. You lay the groundwork for a more efficient system of charging stations in the years to come.

DAN RICHARDS: So what are the other predistributive tools the Biden administration was using?

ANDREW SCHRANK: So one were the performance standards that were used to evaluate candidates for the subsidies under the Biden industrial policy. So traditionally, a lot of countries, when they've adopted industrial policies, have imposed as a quid pro quo that the recipients of the subsidies have to demonstrate that they're efficient, in part by exporting a certain portion of their product. The Biden administration conditioned its subsidies, not primarily on exports, but on equity-enhancing measures.

Are you paying a prevailing wage? Are you setting aside certain resources for small businesses or minority-owned businesses? And a famous example that's received a lot of criticism, are you providing on-site childcare in your semiconductor factories? So those performance standards would be one example of a predistributive measure that was built into the Biden industrial policy.

A second category of predistribution that the Biden administration adopted were means tests. Some of the subsidies, particularly on things like electric vehicle support or home retrofits or appliances or things like that, were means tested. You couldn't get access to them if your income was above a certain level, because the idea was you didn't want the federal government subsidizing upper income families to do something that they already had the resource to do, like buy a Tesla.

And then the third predistributive element of these industrial policies was what I call and others have called place-based industrial policies, the idea that certain investments were targeted at lower income parts of the country, Appalachia, or inner city areas that have been passed by previous policies adopted by previous administrations. So in addition to the antitrust component, I think these three elements run through the different industrial policies that Biden had adopted-- the CHIPS Act, the IRA, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and provide common predistributive thread that's overlooked by the critics of the program.

DAN RICHARDS: So this fusion of predistributive goals with goals that are more of focused on expanding industry was a focus of a lot of criticism of Biden's industrial policy made across the political spectrum, but notably also a critique made by liberals. And what's now known as the movement or theory of abundance liberalism really had this critique of Biden at its center that these policies represented what journalist Ezra Klein described as everything bagel liberalism, that too much was piled onto these policies, sometimes things that were in tension with each other. And it ended up making them less effective at what they were doing. And we can talk more about some examples of that. But I wonder generally, what do you make of that critique?

ANDREW SCHRANK: So the Biden administration clearly was trying to do multiple things with these legislative elements. Was this a good thing? Or was this a bad thing?

Well, there are critics. And they argue precisely, as you say, that Biden should have just chosen one target and shot his arrow. I disagree.

And I disagree for several reasons, one of which is if you think about it, what's the comparison? Are you comparing Biden's industrial policy to a different industrial policy, or to no industrial policy at all? If it's compared to no industrial policy at all, I think it's very hard to say that it was a complete failure.

Real manufacturing investment more than doubled in four years of the Biden administration. That's a little known fact, but you can look at the federal data. It's quite clear. It's hard to say that's a failure.

It's also the case that most of these programs are oversubscribed. The CHIPS office was getting more applications for subsidies than they could meet. Similarly, in the place-based realm, there were many, many, many more communities that wanted these programs to be brought to them than there were actual funds available.

So it's not like there were lots of people saying, no, we don't want to be involved in these policies. If anything, there was too much demand. So the idea that red tape was slowing the exploitation and the employment of these policies is just misbegotten.

Could you have had a more efficient industrial policy if you had narrowed the range of policy targets? Perhaps. But could you have gotten that through Congress? What would it have looked like?

If you're a hardcore environmentalist, you might say, we should have just focused on the environmental elements of this policy. And who cares about the national security stuff? We might have, for example, included the subsidies for green vehicles, but not the tariffs against Chinese vehicles, and allowed the consumers to buy low-cost Chinese vehicles to maximize the environmental impact of these policies. Well, good luck getting that through Congress, where there are people who are more concerned with national security, people more concerned with jobs, with wages, et cetera.

Or if you were on the national security side, you might have said, who cares about the green stuff? We just need to focus on semiconductors and armaments and things like that. Well, good luck getting that through Congress. You had environmental constituencies that would never have gone for it. So I think it's a fantasy to think that you could have had anything but everything bagel liberalism, even if you wanted to.

DAN RICHARDS: But I guess I do wonder, going back to that critique the Biden administration had gotten, that only 100 charging stations were built out of billions of dollars invested or whatever, do you see any merit to the critiques that there were elements of these policies that were simply unfolding too slowly and that speed should have been emphasized more? And I think the kind of abundance liberal type views, they share a lot of the values with what the Biden administration was trying to do. And it was a matter of speed and scale that was the bigger critique. Do you see anything to that?

ANDREW SCHRANK: Well, yes. I mean, realistically, you always would have liked to go faster. Almost always would have liked to go faster. But at the same time, we have checks and balances for a reason.

And it's very hard to criticize people for going too slowly when part of the reason they went too slowly was checks and balances, and then look the other way and say, gee, some people go too fast and override checks and balances, which many of the same people are mentioning in the context of the current moment. Would you have rather just had a unified executive run in and go roughshod over the checks and balances to do these things? Well, some people would. Other people would be very, very wary of that.

One thing that I think is worth keeping in mind is there was variation in the pace of rollout, both across this legislation. The CHIPS Act probably went faster than the IRA and also within this legislation. So to take the charging stations example, some states rolled them out faster than others.

I mean, overall, I don't think there's anyone who thinks they were rolled out as fast as they wanted. But the reality is that some states did roll them out faster than others. It bears study what those states were able to do differently. Was there something about the state government, something about the regulatory environment, something about their representatives in Congress having more juice? But I think once we study this, we will have a better sense for how one might do it better next time.

DAN RICHARDS: Another criticism-- and many of these criticisms are really kind of intertwined. But another is that perhaps the Biden administration and congressional Democrats overestimated how politically effective the geographic dispersal of these investments would be, that there was so much thought put into investing in swing districts or red states or places that might be otherwise resistant, and that doing so would really make it hard for these policies to be rolled back. What do you make of that argument? Do you think there was a miscalculation there on the behalf of the Biden administration?

ANDREW SCHRANK: Well, I definitely think that's the thing that people in the inner circle of the administration are most disappointed about. The folks in the inner circle wish that this had gotten the Democrats back in office in Twenty Twenty-Four. Obviously, it did not.

Is that because they did these policies? Because they didn't do enough of these policies? They didn't do them fast enough? They didn't claim enough credit for them? It's very, very hard to.

There were so many things going on in that election. I mean had a president who pulled out as the incumbent and turned it over to his vice president midway through the campaign. You had a vice president who, by many measures, made heroic efforts, but was just starting way behind the eight ball. You had a number of other things going on that made it a real uphill battle.

The one thing I would say is that I don't think it's the case that spending the money in the purple states was pure political opportunism, and that it didn't pay off. It's worth remembering that many of these purple states are also poor states, and that the money was being spent in poor regions of those states. And I think that was consistent with the egalitarian instincts of the Biden administration.

Would they have liked it to have turned some of those purple states into Democratic states? Obviously, they would have. But I think the reality is they wanted to fight poverty and fight inequality in those states, in addition to generating political payoffs. And that, I think, they did.

DAN RICHARDS: One aspect of Biden's industrial policy that we haven't really touched on are tariffs. President Biden kept most of the tariffs that the first Trump administration had imposed on China, and then increased those tariffs on specific commodities. And today, so many, especially people on the left, have criticized Trump for raising tariffs further in that tariffs are a penalty and tax on American consumers and producers. And they are regressive in their nature.

And so I wonder how you think about Biden's tariff policies. Did they contradict some of his more predistributive ideas? Or what role did they play?

ANDREW SCHRANK: It's a great question, Dan. So you're absolutely right. Tariffs in general are regressive. They tend to hit people who spend more of their paychecks.

And middle and lower income Americans spend almost all of their paychecks. Upper income Americans tend to save and invest. And so tariffs do tend to be regressive.

I think that it's worth noting, as you suggest, that most of those tariffs that were maintained and in some cases increased by President Biden were against China specifically. And that was in part because the China shock, which happened when China achieved permanent normal trade relations with the United States, was brought into the world trading system.

DAN RICHARDS: This was decades ago.

ANDREW SCHRANK: Decades ago-- had huge impacts on American workers and particularly American workers in specific areas in the Midwest, in Appalachia, in these lower income parts of the country. And so I think that the Biden administration maintained those tariffs, in part to offset the China shock or minimize the legacy of the China shock with relatively egalitarian goals. I think it's also worth noting that those tariffs were largely on either commodities that were part of the green transition, things like electric vehicles, batteries, solar panels, things like that, or part of the national security apparatus-- critical minerals, steel, aluminum, and things like that. And that's they're consistent with the goals of the CHIPS Act and the goals of the IRA, the goals of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, et cetera.

They're also against a single country. They were not across-the-board tariffs on every country in the world. So I think they were strategic. I think we can quibble about whether they should have been higher or lower or not exist at all, but I don't see them as being radically inconsistent with the broader industrial policy vision of the Biden administration.

DAN RICHARDS: The Trump administration and the Republican-controlled Congress have rolled back significant portions of these policies, not all of them. Could you help listeners understand where are these policies most intact still? And where have they been most curtailed and undone when we're thinking about the legacy?

ANDREW SCHRANK: So I think that probably the place that they're most intact are the CHIPS act on semiconductors, where not only have the subsidies been maintained, they've actually been increased under the Trump administration. And in fact, the Trump administration has also gone toward direct federal investment in semiconductor companies, specifically in Intel, where the government now has a 10% ownership stake. And there's at least some reason to believe that there will be more things like this to come.

DAN RICHARDS: And part of that was done using money from the CHIPS Act.

ANDREW SCHRANK: It was done using money from the CHIPS Act. And the other part of the equation, which hasn't gotten as much attention, is that the predistributive elements were eliminated. So the recipients of subsidies and investments under the CHIPS Act now are no longer bound to do things provide childcare or prevailing wages, things of that nature.

So the Trump administration has maintained the goals of the CHIPS Act, at least the National security goals and the supply chain goals, but it has not maintained the predistributive goals. Depending on your perspective, this is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is by no means getting rid of the Biden industrial policy. They've scaled back much more aggressively in the IRA, as well as in the place-based aspects of the Infrastructure Act.

A lot of that money had already been spent, particularly the IRA money, but there have been dramatic cutbacks there. And a lot of the remaining infrastructure spending has happened. It's just that the Trump administration has claimed credit for it, even though the legislation was passed by the Biden administration. But the long and short of it is that there has not been a complete undoing of the Biden industrial policies, even if it's been reoriented toward a different agenda and one that is decidedly not predistributive

DAN RICHARDS: So, as you said, the Trump administration has continued and even augmented some aspects of Biden's industrial policy. But you write in your recent article as well, about some of the ways the Trump administration has really taken their own trajectory on their own types of industrial policy. And I wonder, how do you think about the Trump administration has claimed to want to increase American industry and revive American manufacturing? How do you assess the way they're doing it, relative to the Biden administration? What are the biggest differences?

ANDREW SCHRANK: The Trump orientation is decidedly not predistributive. It's much more of a traditional industrial policy. At least if you take the administration at its word, it is decidedly an industrial policy.

They've used tariffs quite aggressively. They've actually moved toward state ownership, which is something the Biden administration had resisted. They have unwound the predistributive elements of these policies.

And they have very explicitly tried to build out national champions. I mean, Intel in chips or Westinghouse in nuclear power are places where they have taken state shares. US Steel, where the federal government now has a golden share.

Those are classic industrial policy instruments. One can like them, one can dislike them. But there's nothing free market about this administration.

DAN RICHARDS: Is it fair to say that both President Biden and President Trump have been more focused on industrial policy than most recent presidential administrations?

ANDREW SCHRANK: So I have a two-part answer. I think that the idea that the United States did no industrial policy until the first Trump administration or the Biden administration is just false. The US has always had an industrial policy.

At times, it's more explicit. At times, it's more implicit. At times, it's more coordinated. At times, it's less coordinated. But we've always had an industrial policy.

I think that in the Trump-Biden era, that has become much more explicit. And they have been, for the first time, at least in my memory, willing to acknowledge that this is what they're doing. I think that what's changed is it's much more explicit, it's much more in your face, and there is a willingness to say that even the pretense of a commitment to free market economics is a thing of the past.

DAN RICHARDS: Well, and at the end of your recent article, you wrote that Biden and Trump's industrial policy combined have contributed to a new sense of American policy and American economics, that laissez-faire economics is no longer the only option. And you say, what this means for the United States is really an open question. And that the answer really to that question, what this new era will mean will be that quote, "The answer will be determined less by the structure of the American state than by the dynamics of political struggle." And I wonder if you could just expand on that a little bit. What do you mean?

ANDREW SCHRANK: Well, the way I would answer that question, Dan, is to say this, that for decades, at least since the Reagan administration, there was this myth that the United States was bound by laissez-faire and free market economics. But like most myths, there's an element of truth to this. There were places the federal government, and even the state governments would not go in terms of industrial policy.

That era is over. And industrial policy is on the table. It's explicit. It's taken on tools that were off the table for many years, right up to state ownership.

And if you think of any game, when the rules are narrow, the strategies are relatively limited and the strategies are relatively clear. And then there's a question of just optimizing whatever your goals are within those rules. When the rules change, and they're up for grabs, political struggle gets much more complicated.

There are many more strategies and tactics to choose from, a lot of new alliance possibilities and coalitional possibilities that are available. And I think that what we've seen in the past decade is a radical shift from that free market era to an era in which all bets are off. And the dynamics of political competition are a lot less predictable.

DAN RICHARDS: If you could advise the Trump administration or go back in time and advise the Biden administration, what would you say are important ways of thinking about these types of policies that maybe you wish got more emphasis or were taken more into consideration? What do you think is being missed?

ANDREW SCHRANK: That's a great question, I think, and this might be a little bit self-aggrandizing, that it would be nice to have had this notion of predistributive industrial policies on the table as the policies were being formulated and implemented. In other words, I think that this is what they were doing, but I don't think they had a word for it. And if you don't have a word for it, it's not legible, and it's hard to plan around it.

And I think that once you put this in a package and you think that this is what I'm doing very explicitly, you can figure out more easily, is policy A consistent with this goal? Is implementation strategy B consistent with that goal? And so one of the reasons I wrote the article was to try to give people a sense of what the guiding thread of these policies was, unconsciously so that if they have the opportunity to do it again, they could take advantage of this and do it more consciously.

DAN RICHARDS: I guess implicit in that is a bigger question, not so much about industrial policy. But do you think predistribution is something we should generally be embracing more as a country for addressing issues of inequality? Do you think it's an underused tool?

ANDREW SCHRANK: There is a fair bit of evidence that Americans, and in particular, middle and lower income Americans, are much more favorably disposed toward predistribution than redistribution, that lower income Americans are very much in favor of starting gate equality, but don't like the idea that they are getting handouts. Whether or not one believes that's what's going on with redistribution, there's a fair bit of survey data right now that suggests that at the lower end of the income distribution, people view predistribution as a better path toward equity than redistribution.

If that's the case, and if one wants more equity in the United States, politically speaking, it might be easier to get it through predistribution than redistribution, whatever one's normative commitments are. I think the Biden administration was very clear on this, and I think that--

DAN RICHARDS: On non-industrial policy--

ANDREW SCHRANK: On social policy. So, I mean, I think one reason they were thinking about things like collective bargaining rights or labor standards or things like that, where they were also very aggressive was through this notion of predistribution. And they picked it up from Jacob Hacker and people in his circle and I think used it to very meaningful extent. I don't think it had been thought about on the industrial policy side in an explicit way, even though I think that what they were doing was de-facto predistribution.

You can also have upwardly predistributive policies. Arguably, that's what the Trump administration is doing right now. It's using industrial policy to shift the income and wealth distribution upward. But in general, I'm an egalitarian. And I would like to see a downwardly predistributive industrial policy.

At the same time, for political reasons, I think, you're more likely to get it through Congress, if you have a downwardly predistributive industrial policy. But this, I think, gets to the real trick that any Democratic administration is going to have to confront in the years ahead, which is now that you've had a move toward a unified executive and a retraction of checks and balances, with Congress seemingly ceding the floor to the White House and the court seemingly ceding the floor to the White House, I think the real dilemma, not just in the realm of industrial policy, but across the board for a Democratic administration is, do you take that ball and run with it and have hyperpresidentialism pursuing your goals and the industrial policy realm, or where have you? Or do you try to reestablish checks and balances?

If you decide you're going to try to have your own unified executive, you might decide we're going all in on a green transition or we're going all in on national security. And we don't have to build these everything-bagel liberal coalitions, et cetera, et cetera, independently of what Andrew thinks. If you decide you want to try to reestablish checks and balances, that's going to be a different ballgame. But to me, that is going to dwarf the debate over industrial policy, social policy, tax policy, or any other policy if the Democrats were to come back into office.

DAN RICHARDS: So just one more way in some ways that the rules have changed and the dynamics of the political struggle are going to be--

ANDREW SCHRANK: Exactly.

DAN RICHARDS: --up for grabs?

ANDREW SCHRANK: Exactly, exactly.

DAN RICHARDS: You've done a lot of work looking at predistribution more broadly. And I wonder, when you think about it as a concept, not just related to industrial policy, where do you see future administrations, future political movements, being able to incorporate predistribution?

ANDREW SCHRANK: I currently work with a group funded by the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a network on innovation and inequality. And what we've been thinking about is whether you could move beyond predistributive policies toward predistributive technologies. Policies come and go. Technologies, once they exist, are very hard to put back in the bottle.

Could you come up with technologies that have an egalitarian directional thrust? It doesn't mean guarantee equity, but at least militate in favor of equity. And then try to build those technologies in order to level the playing field in the years ahead. Now, this might seem kind of Byzantine or Baroque, but we invoke some examples of this historically.

So what are predistributive technologies? Well, if you think about movable type, that democratized the printed word in the 15th and 16th centuries. It took language or written language out of the hands of a small group of scribes and made it available to the masses.

If you think about the pickup truck in the early 20th century, it's what allowed farmers to evade collusive wholesalers-- small farmers on the Great Plains-- and get a better price for their product. Or if you think about the birth control pill that gave women control over their own bodies or the wheelchair ramp, which was critical to disability rights, the hidden civil rights victory of our time. These were all predistributive technologies, even though we didn't think of them as such when we built them.

They don't guarantee egalitarian outcomes. You could have a government that banned wheelchair ramps or banned the pill. And we've seen movements like that. But once the technology is there, it dramatically expands the possibilities for egalitarian outcomes in the years ahead. So what we've been working on is trying to understand the origins of predistributive technologies and even move toward prototyping some predistributive technologies, so that regardless of who's in power, people who are more vulnerable, people who are at the lower end of the income distribution have the ability to deploy technologies to combat their vulnerabilities.

DAN RICHARDS: Are there any prototypes you could share with us?

ANDREW SCHRANK: Well, I mean, I'll give an example that just came to me a couple of weeks ago. But Serena Booth, who's a Professor in computer science here, and I were out at a workshop on AI with the AFL-CIO in Cleveland. And the business manager of one of the unions in Cleveland talked about an app that they are working on that will help him figure out which grievances they are more likely to win, and for what return on their investment and which ones they are less likely to win, which would potentially make their grievance process dramatically more efficient as they are fighting to protect the rights of their workers.

I think often it's the case that workers and workers' movements think of AI as a threat, and don't think of it as an opportunity. Could you think about the Wage and Hour division of the Department of Labor, using AI to dramatically increase its efficiency as it tries to protect workers and labor standards in the United States? Those would be examples of predistributive technologies.

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DAN RICHARDS: Well you have given us so much to think about in so many realms in this conversation and ending somewhere where I didn't expect. But I look forward to hearing more from you on this front in the future. So as always, thank you for coming on to the show, Andrew.

ANDREW SCHRANK: My pleasure. Thank you, Dan. I appreciate it.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode of Trending Globally was produced by me, Dan Richards, with production assistance from Juliana Merullo and Eric Emma. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, additional music from the Blue Dot Sessions.

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