Yascha Mounk

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Noah Smith discuss the rise of the YIMBY (“Yes, in my backyard!”) movement; why childcare, housing, and health care costs are so high in the United States; and what it would look like to embrace a genuine “abundance agenda.”

The real impact of this kind of neoliberalism, if you will, was not the things we did, but the things we didn’t do. There were a number of things we could have done to respond to the competitive threat from China. The People’s Bank of China bought a whole bunch of dollar-denominated bonds, which made the yuan very cheap, which made their exports artificially cheap. This exacerbated the so-called “China Shock” and caused manufacturing to leave America faster than would have been economically efficient. We should have said “No, we’ll brand you a currency manipulator under the WTO and we’ll use countervailing duties to force you to upvalue currency” in 2002. We could have done that and we didn’t do it because we were geopolitically distracted with the War on Terror and because we were ideologically committed to free trade.