I don't think any democracy that exists or has existed thus far is sufficiently perspicacious and effective, and sufficiently granular in its effects, that we should defer to outcomes on the basis that the polity has elected and continues to elect governments that prosecute the policy. 1/

Democracy is a per se good, and can be useful, functional, in a variety of ways. But I don't think understanding it as a tool by which publics ensure governments meet the fixed or at least prior individual preferences of economist conventions captures a great deal of democracies role. 2/

Democracies pursue a lot of bad policies, under that economistic framework or any other (except one that treats outcomes of one flawed set of democratic institutions as optimal by definition). We bother to think about policy because having elections does not obviate the work. 3/

Deep questions about counterfactuals, competing goals, and trade-offs are always with us, about China's industrial policy, and every other policy, in imperfect democracies as much as ugly autocracies. 4/

(A "defender of industrial policy", like a "defender of housing policy", is a nonsequitur. Which policy? It's a kind of lobotomy of a certain strain of economism that an impossible nothing is taken as an achievable baseline so that questions of "policy or not" can seem coherent.) 5/

The best we can address big questions of tradeoffs and counterfactuals is to examine big outcomes over significant periods of time. Our quantitative microscopes cannot help up. 6/

At every step, one can and could have plausibly argued that China's interventions have been net counterproductive, given their choices across tradeoffs, relative to the counterfactual under some alternative. But after forty years of this, the cumulation is pretty undeniable. 7/

I mean, maybe there was some really great set of initial conditions in China 1980 that policy only blunted, and otherwise outcomes would have been even more fantastic. 8/

But from a broad welfare improvement perspective, general economic capacity and capability, national security, national power perspectives, China's overall playbook has proven extraordinarily successful against any baseline distribution of ex ante outcomes. 9/

Does that mean every particular choice, every industrial policy intervention, was great? No, of course not. We still have much to discuss. 10/

But our priors should be a lot more deferential to the possibility there is some good to learn from in them than to centuries-old theoretical ideas that intervention is distortion from which we should in general refrain. /fin