WORK
CHIPS and Science Act
The 2022 US legislation committing over $50 billion in direct subsidies to domestic semiconductor manufacturing — the largest piece of explicit American industrial policy in decades, and a tacit acknowledgment that the free-market doctrine the US preaches abroad does not apply to the technologies it considers strategic.
The
CHIPS and Science Act, signed into law by President Biden in August 2022, committed approximately $52.7 billion in direct federal subsidies to semiconductor manufacturing on American soil, plus an additional $24 billion in investment tax credits. The act represents the largest piece of explicit industrial policy in American legislative history since the Apollo program, and a tacit but unmistakable acknowledgment that the free-market doctrine the United States has spent decades preaching to the rest of the world does not apply to the technologies it considers strategic.
Chang's framework treats the CHIPS Act as paradigmatic evidence of the contradiction
between American practice and American prescription. The country that pressured developing nations to abandon their industrial policies through the WTO and bilateral trade agreements has implemented industrial policy on a scale that would make the East Asian developmental states envious — while continuing to advise developing nations