Max Berwald – Non-Core Post #5

https://www.npr.org/2022/10/06/1126947495/biden-has-52-billion-for-semiconductors-today-work-begins-to-spend-that-windfall

I had to miss infrastructure week, but have been thinking about industrial infrastructure and manufacturing as it pertains to semiconductors. Now that the most hawkish and China-hostile parties appear to be fully in control of US foreign policy, economic decoupling is the order of the day. One of the areas of most intense anxiety is of course semiconductor manufacturing and supply chains, which the US sees as a security concern (largely because any scenario in which Taiwan ROC’s geopolitical status changed is seen as a threat to US access to semiconductors). It’s interesting to follow a story like this while in a seminar on the digital, because the form of the story and its political valences are so reminiscent of industries that we offshored long ago. No one is talking about bringing auto-manufacturing or machine tool manufacturing back to the US, but semiconductors appear as something that may have to be clawed back from “globalization.”