These are all how questions. There is no such thing as industrial policy or not. There is always industrial policy. You seem to evaluate Biden's interventions as failures. That strikes me as extraordinarily premature, even though I think they've not been all that well tailored. 1/

There are real political economy questions, surrounding inflation in a democratic context, for example. Policy that risks inflation is often wiser than policy that errs on the side of unused capacity, over long stretches of time, but inflations are often unsurvivable to a governing party. 2/

That time consistency problem is real. It does not discredit the (let's stipulate, it's not we're we're arguing about here) long-term wisdom of running an economy "hot". It creates problems we have to confront about how to sustain that wise thing given electoral institutions and constraints. 3/

It is true, as you suggest, that there are some policy courses whose results broad publics would want that autocracies can pursue that are more challenging in a democratic context because of these kind of time inconsistency problems, and quirks in general of actual existing democratic processes. 4/

That doesn't mean autocracy is preferable (even setting aside historical claims that democracy is good for development, again a subject of dispute, but not a dispute I'm interested in). 5/

There are lots of reasons to want democracy, so our challenge is to reconcile democratic institutions with an ability to sustain good policies. 6/

The potential space of democratic institutions is huge, of which we've explored only a tiny, flawed fragment, so I don't think there's reason to be pessimistic. 7/

(I don't think democracy/autocracy horse-races are very useful, but just as democracy presents certain difficulties to certain wise policy choices, the political economies of autocracies also have counterproductive affordances.) 8/

(Triumphalisms or damnations based as criteria so course a "democracy" or "autocracy" are bound to be stupid. I am for democracy, but not based on any instrumental claim of its superiority, which would require a careful definition of criteria. It's a prior, ethical commitment.) /fin