Welcome to Confronting Capitalism. I'm Melissa Nashak and I'm here as always with

Vivek Chibber, a professor of sociology at NYU and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory

and strategy. How's it going, B? Well, I'm still alive, Melissa.

Oh, little blessings. We're going to talk about state-led industrial policy.

And we sort of hinted at this in our tariff episode, which you concluded by saying,

we have to evaluate tariffs and their effectiveness, not just in the context of trade policy,

but also in the context of industrial policy, because

the two kind of work together. Yeah, trade policy on its own, tariffs on their own, are just a big

old gift to employers, to capitalists, because you're just putting money in their pockets.

The next question is, are they going to use that money in any kind of effective way?

And the traditional method by which states have ensured that money goes any kind of effective way? The traditional method by which

states have ensured that money goes in the right direction is through what's called industrial

policy. And I think for the left, the question is, okay, first of all, do you want an industrial

policy that is a complement to tariffs? And if you don't want the industrial policy as socialists or as social

Democrats, as progressives, how should we think of our attitudes and our orientation to the global

economy? Right. Because whether or not you agree with Trump's tariffs and their impact on

America's economic development.

I think there's a pretty wide consensus that there are serious and deep structural issues

in the American economy.

And this is something that presidents have been talking about for decades and proposing

different kinds of solutions to.

So Obama, his solution, was very

...