Production-Side Economics: How Nations Build Productive Power

Many economics courses start with consumers and prices. Production-side economics starts with factories, firms, technology, and skills. It asks how nations learn to make complex things, why some regions thrive while others hollow out, and what governments can do about it.

The tradition runs from Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures and Friedrich List's National System of Political Economy to Albert Hirschman's linkages, Alice Amsden's study of South Korea, and today's work by Ha-Joon Chang, Mariana Mazzucato, Dani Rodrik, and Ricardo Hausmann. With the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, industrial policy is back at the center of US policy.

You will study the history and theory, learn the tools for analyzing industries and capabilities, and weigh the evidence on when industrial policy works and when it fails. For a short, intensive option, Elton also offers an executive certificate in industrial policy.

Critics warn that governments are poor at "picking winners," that subsidies invite lobbying and waste, and that import-substitution in Latin America and elsewhere often disappointed. Supporters point to East Asia and to the public origins of many key technologies. You will study the successes and failures side by side and learn what the recent evidence shows.

Elton's program is pluralist: your professors help you understand each school on its own terms, weigh it fairly against the evidence, and reach your own conclusions.