America Has an Industrial Policy for Chips. It Doesn't Have One for People.
AI is no longer a future-of-work hypothetical — it's reshaping job descriptions right now, and the question is whether American workers get retooled or simply replaced. A new argument from The Economist frames it sharply: the US has decided that semiconductors are strategic infrastructure worth serious national investment. It has made no equivalent decision about the humans who work alongside the machines.
Bottom Line
THE BOTTOM LINE: This is a signal-not-noise story. The technology displacing workers is arriving faster than the institutions meant to help them adapt, and the US has so far applied industrial-policy seriousness to machines but not to people. The historical record — particularly the failure to retrain workers after the globalization shock — suggests that defaulting to 'the market will sort it out' carries real, lasting costs. Whether that lesson gets applied this time is genuinely undecided.