No. NAFTA Didn’t Kill American Manufacturing Employment: Afterthoughts

The biggest weasel-phrase–the biggest phrase that is not part of an argument, but rather a placeholder for the fact that I strongly believe that an argument here is needed but have not (yet) thought (my position on) it through (to my satisfaction)–is “proper nurturing of communities of engineering practice”.

Going through the big Vox piece <http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/24/14363148/trade-deals-nafta-wto-china-job-loss-trump> I find it in four places:

  1. “…firms embedded in our communities of engineering practice…”
  2. “…healthy communities of engineering practice…”
  3. “…burturing communities of engineering expertise…”
  4. “…the global treasures that are our communities of engineering practice…”

No. I am not going to deliver today. All I am going to do is point you to six things that you really should read on these issues:

  1. Sue Helper: Supply Chains and Equitable Growth
  2. Michael L. Dertouzos, Robert M. Solow, and Richard K. Lester (1989): Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge (Cambridge: MIT Press: 0262041006) <http://amzn.to/2kH6JSv>
  3. Stephen S. Cohen and John Zysman (1987): Manufacturing Matters: The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy (New York: Basic Books) <http://amzn.to/2kGX65V>
  4. Vaclav Smil (2013): Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing (Cambridge: MIT Press: 0262528355) <http://amzn.to/2kg52u6>
  5. Chad Stone: No One Wins Trade Wars: Trump’s ‘America first’ trade policy will be bad for working Americans…
  6. Philip Delves Broughton: America business is the master, not victim, of globalisation: If businesses saw more value in investing in US workers, they could have done so…

Root Post: http://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/1/24/14363148/trade-deals-nafta-wto-china-job-loss-trump

Has Protectionism Ever Worked?

Q: Has protectionism ever worked? Are there examples of countries throughout history that have embraced protectionist policies, and did that yield positive results? And what do these examples, if there are any, tell us about the economic plans of Mr. Trump?

A: If I were you, I would go grab Robert Allen’s Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction <http://amzn.to/2kgt8pj>, and immediately read chapters 8 and 9.

First, chapter 8: Briefly, tariffs–but on the manufacturing goods of the first and early second industrial revolution where learning-by-doing and developing effective communities of engineering practice–is a piece but only a piece of the standard nineteenth century industrialization package: subsidizing railways, schools, banks, and (the right kind of tariffs). They don’t work without the other three components. They do work for a while–for the mid- and late-nineteenth centuries and into the twentieth, with diminishing effectiveness–if the entire package is successfully implemented.

(Note that the British dominions–Canada, Australia, New Zealand–do fine without the tariffs. They become rich in the late nineteenth century. But in the 20th they do fall behind to some degree because they are not strong in the industries where twentieth century productivity growth is initially most rapid. And note that for countries that already have dominant positions in leading edge high tech communities of engineering practice, tariffs are simply a drag.)

Second, chapter 9: After the standard nineteenth-century package is played out, successful rapid development requires a “big push” and a successfully implemented big push: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and now China. (The Soviet Union is an interesting case–I am not sure Allen has gotten it right.) And a great many other countries have tried for “big pushes”, and failed. Tariffs on the goods in which your economy is going to have a comparative advantage in a generation are useful, but only those tariffs…

Trump’s plans–whatever they may be, and nobody knows what they are, not even, or perhaps especially, not him–have nothing to do with past successful episodes of the right kind of tariffs as part of a pro-growth or pro-opportunity industrial policy mix.

Sincerely yours,

Brad DeLong

Professor of Economics J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley
delong@econ.berkeley.edu
925 708 0467
@delong

Regional Policy and Distributional Policy in a World Where People Want to Ignore the Value and Contribution of Knowledge- and Network-Based Increasing Returns

Pascal Lamy: “When the wise man points at the moon, the fool looks at the finger…”

Perhaps in the end the problem is that people want to pretend that they are filling a valuable role in the societal division of labor, and are receiving no more than they earn–than they contribute.

But that is not the case. The value–the societal dividend–is in the accumulated knowledge of humanity and in the painfully constructed networks that make up our value chains.

A “contribution” theory of what a proper distribution of income might be can only be made coherent if there are constant returns to scale in the scarce, priced, owned factors of production. Only then can you divide the pile of resources by giving to each the marginal societal product of their work and of the resources that they own.

That, however, is not the world we live in.

In a world–like the one we live in–of mammoth increasing returns to unowned knowledge and to networks, no individual and no community is especially valuable. Those who receive good livings are those who are lucky–as Carrier’s workers in Indiana have been lucky in living near Carrier’s initial location. It’s not that their contribution to society is large or that their luck is replicable: if it were, they would not care (much) about the departure of Carrier because there would be another productive network that they could fit into a slot in.

All of this “what you deserve” language is tied up with some vague idea that you deserve what you contribute–that what your work adds to the pool of society’s resources is what you deserve.

This illusion is punctured by any recognition that there is a large societal dividend to be distributed, and that the government can distribute it by supplementing (inadequate) market wages determined by your (low) societal marginal product, or by explicitly providing income support or services unconnected with work via social insurance. Instead, the government is supposed to, somehow, via clever redistribution, rearrange the pattern of market power in the economy so that the increasing-returns knowledge- and network-based societal dividend is predistributed in a relatively egalitarian way so that everybody can pretend that their income is just “to each according to his work”, and that they are not heirs and heiresses coupon clipping off of the societal capital of our predecessors’ accumulated knowledge and networks.

On top of this we add: Polanyian disruption of patterns of life–local communities, income levels, industrial specialization–that you believed you had a right to obtain or maintain, and a right to believe that you deserve. But in a market capitalist society, nobody has a right to the preservation of their local communities, to their income levels, or to an occupation in their industrial specialization. In a market capitalist society, those survive only if they pass a market profitability test. And so the only rights that matter are those property rights that at the moment carry with them market power–the combination of the (almost inevitably low) marginal societal products of your skills and the resources you own, plus the (sometimes high) market power that those resources grant to you.

This wish to believe that you are not a moocher is what keeps people from seeing issues of distribution and allocation clearly–and generates hostility to social insurance and to wage supplement policies, for they rip the veil off of the idea that you deserve to be highly paid because you are worth it. You aren’t.

And this ties itself up with regional issues: regional decline can come very quickly whenever a region finds that its key industries have, for whatever reason, lost the market power that diverted its previously substantial share of the knowledge- and network-based societal dividend into the coffers of its firms. The resources cannot be simply redeployed in other industries unless those two have market power to control the direction of a share of the knowledge- and network-based societal dividend. And so communities decline and die. And the social contract–which was supposed to have given you a right to a healthy community–is broken.

As I have said before, humans are, at a very deep and basic level, gift-exchange animals. We create and reinforce our social bonds by establishing patterns of “owing” other people and by “being owed”. We want to enter into reciprocal gift-exchange relationships. We create and reinforce social bonds by giving each other presents. We like to give. We like to receive. We like neither to feel like cheaters nor to feel cheated. We like, instead, to feel embedded in networks of mutual reciprocal obligation. We don’t like being too much on the downside of the gift exchange: to have received much more than we have given in return makes us feel very small. We don’t like being too much on the upside of the gift exchange either: to give and give and give and never receive makes us feel like suckers.

We want to be neither cheaters nor saps.

It is, psychologically, very hard for most of us to feel like we are being takers: that we are consuming more than we are contributing, and are in some way dependent on and recipients of the charity of others. It is also, psychologically, very hard for most of us to feel like we are being saps: that others are laughing at us as they toil not yet consume what we have produced.

And it is on top of this evopsych propensity to be gift-exchange animals–what Adam Smith called our “natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange”–we have built our complex economic division of labor. We construct property and market exchange–what Adam Smith called our natural propensity “to truck, barter, and exchange” to set and regulate expectations of what the fair, non-cheater non-sap terms of gift-exchange over time are.

We devise money as an institution as a substitute for the trust needed in a gift-exchange relationship, and we thus construct a largely-peaceful global 7.4B-strong highly-productive societal division of labor, built on:

  • assigning things to owners—who thus have both the responsibility for stewardship and the incentive to be good stewards…
  • very large-scale webs of win-win exchange…
    mediated and regulated by market prices…

There are enormous benefits to arranging things this way. As soon as we enter into a gift-exchange relationship with someone or something we will see again–perhaps often–it will automatically shade over into the friend zone. This is just who we are. And as soon as we think about entering into a gift-exchange relationship with someone, we think better of them. Thus a large and extended division of labor mediated by the market version of gift-exchange is a ver powerful creator of social harmony.

This is what the wise Albert Hirschman called the doux commerce thesis. People, as economists conceive them, are not “Hobbesians” focusing on their narrow personal self-interest, but rather “Lockeians”: believers in live-and-let live, respecting others and their spheres of autonomy, and eager to enter into reciprocal gift-exchange relationships—both one-offs mediated by cash alone and longer-run ones as well.

In an economist’s imagination, people do not enter a butcher’s shop only when armed cap-a-pie and only with armed guards. They do not fear that the butcher will knock him unconscious, take his money, slaughter him, smoke him, and sell him as long pig.

Rather, there is a presumed underlying order of property and ownership that is largely self-enforcing, that requires only a “night watchman” to keep it stable and secure.

Yet to keep the fiction that we are all fairly playing the reciprocal game of gift exchange in a 7.4 billion-strong social network–that we are neither cheaters nor saps–we need to ignore that we are coupon clippers living off of our societal inheritance.

And to do this, we need to do more than (a) set up a framework for the production of stuff, (b) set up a framework for the distribution of stuff, and so (c) create a very dense reciprocal network of interdependencies to create and reinforce our belief that we are all one society.

We need to do so in such a way that people do not see themselves, are not seen as saps–people who are systematically and persistently taken advantage of by others in their societal and market gift-exchange relationships. We need to do so in such a way that people do not see themselves, are not seen as, and are not moochers–people who systematically persistently take advantage of others in their societal and market gift-exchange relationships. We need to do this in the presence of a vast increasing-returns in the knowledge- and network-based societal dividend and in spite of the low societal marginal product of any one of us.

Thus we need to do this via clever redistribution rather than via explicit wage supplements or basic incomes or social insurance that robs people of the illusion that what they receive is what they have earned and what they are worth through their work.

Now I think it is an open question whether it is harder to do the job via predistribution, or to do the job via changing human perceptions to get everybody to understand that:

  • no, none of us is worth what we are paid.
  • we are all living, to various extents, off of the dividends from our societal capital
  • those of us who are doing especially well are those of us who have managed to luck into situations in which we have market power–in which the resources we control are (a) scarce, (b) hard to replicate quickly, and (c) help produce things that rich people have a serious jones for right now.

All of the above is in some sense a prolegomon to a thoughtful, intelligent, and practical piece by Noah Smith:

Noah Smith: Four Ways to Help the Midwest: “When… Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio voted for Donald Trump, they… roll[ed] the economic dice…

It’s not clear yet whether President-elect Trump will or can follow through on his promises to revamp U.S. trade policy…

Note: given his hires, it is pretty clear that he has chosen not to. But let me let Noah go on:

It’s even more dubious whether that will have any kind of positive effect on the Midwest…

Let me say that it is clear that they won’t: a stronger dollar from higher interest rates and more elite consumption from tax cuts for the rich are likely to produce another chorus of the song we heard in the 1980s under Reagan, which was a disaster for the midwest and for the Reagan Democrats of Macomb County. But let me let Noah go on…

His promises resonated…. The Midwest needs help…. “The largest declines [in economic mobility have been] concentrated in states in the industrial Midwest states such as Michigan and Illinois.”… [The] Democrats[‘]… targeted tax credits and minimum-wage hikes is nothing more than a Band-Aid [because]it ignores the importance of jobs, for dignity and respect, for mobility and independence, and for a feeling of personal value and freedom. Handouts ease the pain of poverty, but in the end, Midwesterners–like most people–want jobs, and they went with the candidate who promised them.

Nor should we simply encourage Midwesterners to move to more vibrant regions. As economist and writer Adam Ozimek has noted, many people can’t easily abandon the place where they grew up, where their friends and family are, and where they often own homes….

Conor Sen has a big idea that I like–a bailout of public-employee pension obligations in the Rust Belt…. But that’s just a first step. I propose four new pillars….

  1. Infrastructure: Sick economies and shrinking population have left Rust Belt states and cities unable to pay for infrastructure improvements. As a result, many cities look like disaster areas. The federal government should allocate funds to repair and improve the Midwest’s roads, bridges and trains, and to upgrade its broadband….

  2. Universities:…. The Midwest has a number of good schools (I went to one of them for my Ph.D.), but more could be built, and existing universities could be expanded. Perhaps even more importantly, local and state governments in the Midwest could work with universities and local companies to create more academic-private partnerships and to boost knowledge industries in places like Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Columbus, Ohio. As things stand, Midwesterners tend to move away as soon as they graduate from college….

  3. Business Development: Some cities in Colorado have embraced a development policy it calls economic gardening. The program helps provide resources for locals to start their own businesses. It furnishes them with market research and connects them with needed resources….

  4. Urbanism: Tech hubs like San Francisco and Austin, Texas, are using development restrictions to keep their population densities in check. That gives Midwestern cities an opening to attract refugees from the high-rent metropolises of the two coasts. Cities like Detroit and Cleveland can work on creating neighborhoods that are attractive to the creative class, while allowing housing development to keep rents cheap. College towns like Ann Arbor can reduce their own development restrictions and allow themselves to become industrial hubs….

Governments — federal, state and local — can revitalize the long-suffering Rust Belt. Some locations have already begun this transformation — Pittsburgh, which is rebuilding a knowledge economy based around Carnegie Mellon University and undertaking various urban renewal projects, provides a great blueprint. Targeted regional development policy can prepare cities in the Midwest for the industries of the future, whatever those may turn out to be. And it can reassure the people living in these areas that their government hasn’t forgotten them.


Cf.: Musings on “Just Deserts” and the Opening of Plato’s Republic | Monday Smackdown: The Ongoing Flourishing of Behavioral Economics Makes My Position Here Look Considerably Better, No? | Inequality: Brown University Janus Forum | Noah Smith Eats Greg Mankiw’s Just Desserts

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Finding Better Ideas to Rebuild America

Hamilton Google Search

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Finding Better Ideas to Rebuild America: “‘Concrete Economics,’ by University of California-Berkeley professors Brad DeLong and Stephen S. Cohen, needs an expanded sequel…

…900 pages long, with charts, data, theory and an exhaustive list of historical case studies. That book would become the Bible of the New Industrialist movement that is just beginning to grope its way out of the ashes of the neoliberal free-market consensus. Perhaps that tome will get written. But DeLong and Cohen couldn’t wait to write it, because we need new ideas now, and they decided they had to put a sketch of those new ideas into people’s heads very quickly. And I agree with their decision. If you’re at all concerned about economic policy, this is a book you need to read. It will take you only a couple of hours, and the time will be well-spent….

The peril of this sort of historical analysis is that it’s always easy to make the past fit some pattern after the fact. Sometimes policy causes big economic shifts, and sometimes it’s just along for the ride. A cautionary tale is provided by Japan’s experience, which DeLong and Cohen extol. Although Japan’s government certainly did try to pick winners — and still does — this probably stopped working around the late 1970s. For a good primer on how Japan’s industrial policy petered out, see ‘Can Japan Compete?,’ by Michael Porter, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Mariko Sakakibara. Nor have South Korea and China, for all their fast growth, yet managed to reach the income levels of the finance-ridden U.S….

DeLong and Cohen are absolutely right — the American mind has been far too captured by the beguilingly simple and powerful theory of free-market dogma. That theory was oversold, and we need a corrective…. DeLong and Cohen don’t focus on elevating… theories…. DeLong and Cohen propose to frame economic policy programs in terms of simple, tangible, objectives. Build railroads across the West. Break up monopolies. Fund Big Science…. This short, almost casually sketched book is really the opening shot in a long campaign… to build a New Industrialism–an approach to economic policy that respects the power of the private sector but isn’t afraid of an activist government. No one quite knows what New Industrialism is going to be yet. ‘Concrete Economics’ is meant to get people thinking about what it ought to be.

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Finding Better Ideas to Rebuild America

Must-Read: Noah Smith: Finding Better Ideas to Rebuild America: “‘Concrete Economics,’ by University of California-Berkeley professors Brad DeLong and Stephen S. Cohen, needs an expanded sequel…

…900 pages long, with charts, data, theory and an exhaustive list of historical case studies. That book would become the Bible of the New Industrialist movement that is just beginning to grope its way out of the ashes of the neoliberal free-market consensus. Perhaps that tome will get written. But DeLong and Cohen couldn’t wait to write it, because we need new ideas now, and they decided they had to put a sketch of those new ideas into people’s heads very quickly. And I agree with their decision. If you’re at all concerned about economic policy, this is a book you need to read. It will take you only a couple of hours, and the time will be well-spent….

The peril of this sort of historical analysis is that it’s always easy to make the past fit some pattern after the fact. Sometimes policy causes big economic shifts, and sometimes it’s just along for the ride. A cautionary tale is provided by Japan’s experience, which DeLong and Cohen extol. Although Japan’s government certainly did try to pick winners — and still does — this probably stopped working around the late 1970s. For a good primer on how Japan’s industrial policy petered out, see ‘Can Japan Compete?,’ by Michael Porter, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Mariko Sakakibara. Nor have South Korea and China, for all their fast growth, yet managed to reach the income levels of the finance-ridden U.S….

DeLong and Cohen are absolutely right — the American mind has been far too captured by the beguilingly simple and powerful theory of free-market dogma. That theory was oversold, and we need a corrective…. DeLong and Cohen don’t focus on elevating… theories…. DeLong and Cohen propose to frame economic policy programs in terms of simple, tangible, objectives. Build railroads across the West. Break up monopolies. Fund Big Science…. This short, almost casually sketched book is really the opening shot in a long campaign… to build a New Industrialism–an approach to economic policy that respects the power of the private sector but isn’t afraid of an activist government. No one quite knows what New Industrialism is going to be yet. ‘Concrete Economics’ is meant to get people thinking about what it ought to be.

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Apple in China

Must-Read: Ben Thompson: Apple in China: “Apple… with its model of status-delivering hardware differentiated by software locked to its devices…

…has been uniquely successful in the world’s most populous country. [And] for many years Apple’s model freed them from the usual hoops that most Western tech companies have had to jump through to get a piece of the irresistible Chinese market. For example:

  • Microsoft spends $500 million a year in China, mostly at its Beijing R&D center (its largest outside of Redmond), and has promised to up that total after a recent antitrust investigation
  • Cisco pledged to invest $10 billion in China last year after being increasingly frozen out from Chinese purchases after the Edward Snowden revelations
    Qualcomm, after settling an antitrust case, formed a $280 million joint venture with a provincial government that included technology transfer
  • Intel has promised up to $5.5 billion to transform a chip plant that it originally said would be two generations behind to become cutting edge; a few months later the company formed a joint venture with two local firms in direct response to Chinese concern about reliance on foreign companies in the chip industry. That follows a previous $1.5 billion investment in two other chipmakers partially owned by the Chinese government
  • Dell adopted a new strategy last fall predicated on partnering in China to the tune of $125 billion over five years, forming a joint venture with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and deep partnerships with Kingsoft Corporation for work in the cloud ‘fully supporting and embracing the China ‘Internet+’ national strategy.’

The Internet+ strategy is a plan to integrate the Internet with traditional industries, but its introduction has gone hand-in-hand with an increasingly strong preference for Chinese technology from Chinese firms. Thus the partnerships, joint ventures, and investment. And yet, until now, the most successful American tech company in China has operated mostly without interference…

Must-read: Eduardo Porter: “As Jobs Vanish, Forgetting What Government Is For”

Must-Read: Eduardo Porter: As Jobs Vanish, Forgetting What Government Is For: “Though the decline of well-paid working class jobs is often portrayed as the inevitable consequence of globalization and technological change…

…it is in large part the result of a failure of government…. ‘Concrete Economics’ (Harvard Business Review Press) by J. Bradford DeLong and Stephen Cohen… ‘American Amnesia’ (Simon and Schuster) by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson… point out that for all our love of rugged individualism, government played a large and underappreciated role in reshaping the American economy before — and it could do so again….

High tariffs against imports imposed from the time of Alexander Hamilton, to help foster America’s industrial development… huge grants of land to build railways… [which] vastly increased productivity in agriculture… catalog retailing to centralized meatpacking… innovations that spawned entire industries…. Bolstering workers’ human capital… the Land-Grant College Act… the G.I. Bill…. Local governments across the country poured money and resources into an impressive expansion of secondary education…. Finally, the government directly created jobs — whether in the burst of infrastructure investment in the 1930s that gave us the Hoover Dam, among other huge projects, or the tenfold increase in federal spending from 1939 to 1945 as the government built up the military-industrial complex to fight Germany and Japan.

Why American politics turned against this successful model of pragmatic policy-making remains controversial…. The good news is that the United States may have the best opportunity in decades to overcome its anti-government political biases…. So what’s holding us back? The loss of a vision, once shared across much of the ideological spectrum, of what government can accomplish, when it is allowed to do its job.

Must-watch: Min Zhu et al.: Breaking the Oil Spell: The Path to Diversification

Must-Watch: Min Zhu et al.: Breaking the Oil Spell: The Path to Diversification: “H.E. Obaid H. Al Tayer… Zeti Akhtar Aziz… J. Bradford DeLong… Simon Johnson… Reda Cherif… Fuad Hasanov…

…Imagine a future in which oil is no longer the main source of energy. Such a future is not necessarily cataclysmic for oil exporters if they succeed in diversifying their economies. To achieve this, however, they must change the prevailing economic model. In the past, countries such as Brazil, Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore have made major strides in economic diversification, and this book distills lessons from their experiences to help guide the Gulf countries and other oil exporters today. Their stories reveal that incentives for firms and workers need to be realigned to develop technologically sophisticated export-oriented industries. More important, their stories show that standard growth policy prescriptions may not be enough and changing incentives for firms and workers is essential. Breaking the Oil Spell sheds light on what constitutes true economic diversification and the role of the state in achieving it.

http://www.imf.org/external/np/seminars/eng/2016/mcd/index.htm | http://bcove.me/5yk1fp5o

Must-read: Ben Thompson: “Andy Grove and the iPhone SE”

Must-Read: Invest like mad in your technology drivers–even if it looks as if they are not the most profitable. But, conversely, don’t keep pouring money into things that used to be technology drivers but are no longer. And keep your mind open and place many bets as to what your future true technology drivers will be:

Ben Thompson: Andy Grove and the iPhone SE: “While [Gordon] Moore is immortalized for having created ‘Moore’s Law’…

…the fact that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years is the result of a choice made first and foremost by Intel to spend the amount of time and money necessary to make Moore’s Law a reality… and the person most responsible for making this choice was Grove…. Grove [also] created a culture predicated on a lack of hierarchy, vigorous debate, and buy-in to the cause (compensated with stock)…. Intel not only made future tech companies possible, it also provided the template for how they should be run….

Grove’s most famous decision…. Intel was founded as a memory company… the best employees and best manufacturing facilities were devoted to memory in adherence to Intel’s belief that memory was their ‘technology driver’…. The problem is that by the mid-1980s Japanese competitors were producing more reliable memory at lower costs (allegedly) backed by unlimited funding from the Japanese government…. Grove soon persuaded Moore, who was still CEO to get out of the memory business, and then proceeded on the even more difficult task of getting the rest of Intel on board; it would take nearly three years for the company to fully commit to the microprocessor….

Intel today is still a very profitable company…. [But] the company’s strategic position is much less secure than its financials indicate, thanks to Intel’s having missed mobile. The critical decision came in 2005…. Steve Jobs was interested in… the XScale ARM-based processor… [for] the iPhone. Then-CEO Paul Otellini….

We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we’d done it…. You have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do…. At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.

It was the opposite of Grove’s memory-to-microprocessor decision: Otellini prioritized Intel’s current business (x86 processors) instead of moving to what was next (Intel would go on to sell XScale to Marvell in 2006), much to the company’s long-term detriment…