Saikat Chakrabarti
speaker
279 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 1 Jun
Saikat Chakrabarti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The thing that we've sort of lost is a little bigger than just public financing. It's sort of public institutions that proactively go out and make stuff happen. We have a little bit of this now. We have it with DARPA, you know, on sort of research and development projects. And that's kind of public financing as well of those kinds of projects.
But we've lost it for the entire sector of creating industries and creating infrastructure projects. And there was a loan program at the DOE that the IRA funded for clean energy projects that Jigar Shah ran. It's a great program, but it's a wait and see approach. So people apply for loans for projects they want to do. But there's all kinds of projects that just aren't happening.
Like right now, a big bottleneck to expanding electric grids is a transformer shortage because we only have a few companies that make transformers. And we only have one company that makes electric steel that we need for transformers. And no one's popping up to make new electric steel companies.
So what I'm imagining is something like the RFC today, Reconstruction Finance Corporation would push them to expand production. If they don't do it, fund startups. And if they don't do it, put up state-owned corporations, right? And this is what China does. This is exactly what China does. China got these ideas from us. You know, this was what we used to do.
And, you know, other countries in Europe have versions of this. And it's key to note that it's not just, you know, it's not just like this one institution. If we put it in, it's going to fix everything. You know, Germany has all kinds of financing mechanisms. They have agricultural co-op banks. They have...
have this whole range of financing for small and medium manufacturing in the country, and that's held up a lot of their economy. And in China, similar. They have these big industrial banks that fund all kinds of projects. But it's really just this proactive nature of finding projects that are getting in the way of progress and then making sure those things get built.
I think that is the big part of the story. The major part of the story is after the New Deal, and there's a great book called Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips Fine, which really details the push of that ideology over 40 years, a long-term plan.
And I think that's why even when presidents came in wanting to do a little bit more Obama, I forget which book, but there's some book where Obama actually said after recession, shouldn't we do our moonshot project now? But he was surrounded by people who was like, no, no, no, obviously we shouldn't be doing that. You know, when they're talking about
I think that was part of the problem. You know, in the context of a larger economy, you can't just say one little high-speed rail line, right? And they also funded Solyndra and Tesla, as you point out in the book, right? But they only wanted to do those two projects, and they just focused on the failure of Solyndra rather than the huge success of Tesla.
Well, that guarantee program funded more than just those two, right? Yeah, but those are the big ones.
I think it's actually important to remember that for most of the cases in the 20th century, it wasn't under a war or some kind of emergence like that. You know, there was usually some political party that came into power, you know, in Western Europe or in South Korea that really just pitched the mission of let's get rich. You know, let's make society rich.
Finland did this after the fall of the Berlin Wall in like the 80s and 90s. And that was pretty recent. So it's possible for a politics to come in and say the mission is... Our society has been kind of declining. We're stuck. People's wages have been stagnating. And we actually need to fix that. And I actually think the politics is already almost there.
I think that's what people thought they're voting for with Obama and with Trump and to an extent with Biden. Biden really campaigned on a bit of a mission. And it was in a crisis. And it was in a crisis. Which increased people's ambitions by quite a bit. Yeah.
And I think I think there's just been this general sense that whatever the current political order is, is not delivering the promise that people have had, you know, that America made of people in the postwar era. So we're looking for something new that's going to start delivering that again.
So I think the real challenge actually is for a political leader to come in and really pitch the whole thing. Operation Warp Speed happened during a crisis, but it wasn't big enough. It was like one small mission. We have done a lot of little small missions. We just need Operation Warp Speed for everything.
And it's through that mission that I think you figure out what the new rules and institutions should be. It wasn't like... We threw out all the rules during World War II. There was tons of paperwork, you know, and the companies complained constantly about all the paperwork they had to do.
But we had the War Production Board and, you know, Don Nelson would be going around trying to figure out what paperwork is actually creating a bottleneck and what paperwork is necessary, right? And that's something we need to be able to do at the agency level.
I'll say Destructive Creation by Mark Wilson is probably the most detailed book I read about the actual mobilization during World War II. I've read the book. When you read what they did, it is shocking. It's amazing. It's really amazing.
Second book I'd say is Bad Samaritans by Ha-Joon Chang, which tells a story of how a bunch of developed countries managed to go into mission mode and develop their countries. And the third I'd say is probably The Defining Moment by Jonathan Alter. It's about FDR's first hundred days and really paints a picture of his style of leadership and how he was able to do so much without legislation.
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