CommentaryInsightsPerspectivesExplainers
Type
Perspectives
A considered view: a long-form piece in which a senior practitioner or scholar sets out a structured view of a structural question, and states where they write from.
1,500–3,000 words · Linked sources and notes; a vantage-point statement · Signed by its author
40 pieces
Pieces
- PerspectivesTariffs & Trade Agreements
A bilateral arrangement locks in a counterparty, which is the part of a trading position most likely to change
Goods imports from China fell from a monthly average of 45 billion dollars in 2022 to 26 in 2025, and exports to it from 13 to 9, while total imports and exports of goods and services each rose by 0.28 trillion dollars across the same three years. No series on this site describes an arrangement of either kind, so what each locks in is argued here and not measured.
- PerspectivesIndustrial Policy
Industrial strategy is a decade-long commitment made by institutions that are not built to hold one
Spending on manufacturing plant rose from a yearly rate of 75 billion dollars in 2020 to 244 in 2024, lifting the factory share of all nonresidential building from 8.8 percent to 18.8. Manufacturing employment reached its high for these six years in 2023 and is lower now, which is what it looks like when a country can order buildings faster than the institutions to run them.
- PerspectivesGovernance & Institutions
Reform of a multilateral institution changes behaviour only when it changes what the institution must count
Reform is argued as a question of votes and chairs, while behaviour is set by the balance sheet, the appropriation and the measure that decides eligibility. The statistics that would test any of it are national, and this site holds no comparable published series for the institutions themselves.
- PerspectivesIndustrial Policy
Ten of fifty-one jurisdictions are concentrated in both production and engineering work, and the record cannot show a cluster forming in any of them
Twenty-five jurisdictions employ production workers more intensively than the nation and twenty-three do the same for architecture and engineering, but only ten do both. The rate at which people quit a job, which is the closest thing the record holds to the movement a cluster runs on, gave its lowest reading of the window in 2025.
- PerspectivesStrategic Technology
Diffusion rather than invention is the binding step in technological change, and no series in the record counts it
Computer and electronic product output rose 21.1 index points between 2020 and 2025 while manufacturing output as a whole ended 2.7 points below its own 2017 base. Core capital-goods orders, the closest series in the record to the channel by which equipment reaches firms that do not make it, averaged 77 billion dollars a month in 2022 and the same in 2025.
- PerspectivesMacroeconomics & Markets
Two participation rates moved apart, and that gap is where ageing would enter the arithmetic
Headline participation gained 0.7 points between 2020 and 2025 while participation inside the 25-54 band gained 2.2, and the two rates divide by different populations. That gap is the shape an ageing population would take in a labour statistic, but none of these series counts anybody's age, so the shape is all it is.
- PerspectivesEconomic Security
A supply chain is governed on private books, and the public statistics reach only its edges
American business held an average of 2,663 billion dollars of inventory across 2025, 35.1 percent above 2020, and that buffer is the working instrument of resilience. The series records its size and nothing else: not who holds it, not against which supplier, not where the next tier sits.
- PerspectivesIndustrial Policy
Each instrument of economic statecraft has its own published series and the doctrine meant to rank them has none
Construction spending on manufacturing plant ran at 75 billion dollars a year in 2020 and 215 in 2025, while manufacturing output on a 2017 base of 100 ended the window at 97.3. Every instrument of statecraft has a published series, and the ranking that says which instrument yields when two collide has none.
- PerspectivesTrade & Investment
A foreign ministry cannot spend attention on fifty states, and should not try
California holds 39,431,263 residents and Wyoming 587,618, and each sends the same two senators to Washington. A ministry with a finite diary has to decide which of those two facts it is optimising against, because the rankings they produce are not the same.
- PerspectivesIndustrial Policy
In fifty of fifty-one jurisdictions the largest occupational group pays below the median
The biggest block of jobs in almost every American state is a below-median one, and in 47 of 51 it is the same group. Industrial work sits in the middle of that ladder, which is a better case for it than its advocates usually make and a smaller one than they claim.
- PerspectivesWorkforce & Skills
The labour force fell in 39 of 51 jurisdictions in a single month
Between June and July 2026 the civilian labour force fell in 39 states and the District of Columbia's column, and rose in twelve. The movements are tiny, they point the same way, and the file that records them cannot tell you whether that means anything.
- PerspectivesWorkforce & Skills
The states that make the most things are not the states with the most engineers
Of the eight states where production work is most concentrated, four hold less than the national share of architecture and engineering jobs and two more hold barely the national share. That gap, not the incentive package, is the binding constraint on where a complex facility can be built and run.
- PerspectivesRegional Development
Read a state government the way you would read a credit, not a brochure
State tax collections per resident run from 2,279 dollars in Alaska to 8,028 in Vermont, and the spread describes which layer of government collects rather than how heavily anyone is taxed. The useful questions are what the base is, what it is exposed to, and what the state does not levy at all.
- PerspectivesDevelopment Finance
Financial depth changes what capital costs and not what a country is able to build
The policy rate moved 4.94 points between 2021 and 2023 and the thirty-year mortgage rate moved 3.85 over the same two years, which is what a deep system does. Across the same window manufacturing output stayed below its 2017 base in every reading.
- PerspectivesRegional Development
The occupation that concentrates pays above its local median in every jurisdiction, and the occupation that spreads pays above it in ten
Computer and mathematical work pays more than the middle job in all fifty-one jurisdictions; production work does so in ten, six of which hold the country's lowest median wages. Production is also the more evenly spread of the two, at or above the national share in 27 jurisdictions against 13.
- PerspectivesIndustrial Policy
What an allocator actually learns from four flat years of industrial output
Industrial production has spent five straight readings within 1.2 points of its 2017 base. That flat line is not evidence that nothing is being built. It is evidence that the aggregate cannot answer the question capital is asking.
- PerspectivesInfrastructure
Shovel-ready is a wage question before it is a permitting one
Texas and California employ almost exactly the same number of construction and extraction workers. The median wage in one is 49,170 dollars and in the other 71,670. A national cost per mile that ignores that is not a cost estimate.
- PerspectivesFiscal Policy
Ohio levies a corporate income tax and collected 176 thousand dollars from it
In the FY2025 collections file the corporate income tax runs from 32.9 percent of New Hampshire's state taxes to effectively nothing in Ohio, and four states have no such levy at all. The share is a poor guide to how a state treats capital, and it is used as a good one.
- PerspectivesIndustrial Policy
What transfers between places is the method, not the programme
Spending on manufacturing plant rose from 75 billion dollars a year to 244 and then fell to 215, and no file held here says where a dollar of it landed. The structures that decide whether such spending works are published state by state, but nothing here records a single award, decision or outcome.
- PerspectivesLabor Markets
Healthcare employs more people at higher median pay than production work, which does not mean a transition has held anywhere
Summed across the fifty-one jurisdictions in the 2025 occupational file, healthcare practitioners outnumber production workers by 1,258,080, and in all fifty-one the practitioner median wage is the higher of the two. The jurisdiction most concentrated in that work has the third-lowest median wage of the fifty-one.