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> expected to read something novel around increasing public investment in education

Funding for education has gone up for decades (even when accounting for inflation) and results have been flat.

> but the advice seems to be plain old protectionism, which has been shown to not work and only lead to domestic companies not remaining competitive.

In a truly free market, sure, but that is not the reality of our current order. If nothing else, America-based labor and corporations must compete at a disadvantage relative to their offshored counterparts because of the regulatory and tax burden our government places on them. Perhaps you think those burdens are warranted, but if so it is only fair that the scales be balanced so that Americans can actually compete. To do otherwise is simply to incentivize offshoring to companies that do not provide the level of labor protections we expect here in the West (e.g. Apple using Foxconn as a manufacturing partner).

There are other benefits to tariffs, including that they are far less intrusive to the freedoms of the ordinary citizen (the income tax leading to the IRS is one of the most invasive aspects of the the modern state).

Lastly, some level of protectionism may be warranted if only to preserve domestic supply chains for critical industries, at least in a regulatory environment that otherwise favors offshoring.

The only fair way is that whenever you make regulations to protect workers, those regulations need to apply to workers from any country whose goods are imported or are competitive.

The only fair way to do that is for us to adopt all the labor regulations of say France, in order to export anything into that country (plus all the other labor regulations of all the other countries, many of which will inevitably conflict with each other).

That ends (quite quickly I think) in isolation of trade, an inability to pass new labor laws, or a single world government.

Or just give tariff discounts to those places that treat their workers (and the environment) better.

>Funding for education has gone up for decades (even when accounting for inflation) and results have been flat.

Throwing money around in the wrong directions doesn't magically return better results. You need to make sure the money goes to where the pain points are, otherwise it will just get chewed up by the bureaucratic machine and nothing will come out of it.

Hence why there is no need to throw more money into education. If there are better interventions, then simply have the educational institutions redirect the extra money we are already giving towards things that actually work.

That said, there has been much research on educational interventions, and little (if any) of it shows meaningful long term impact.

Who in America has the fortitude to say we should cut funding to liberal arts and social studies because China sure as heck isn’t wasting money on those.

You made your career in a social studies field.

Law is a high IQ version of a service trade, like being a Disney vacation agent.

OK, but that's orthogonal to whether it's rooted in social studies, math, or English.

Law is a self-contained field that predates and doesn’t rely on any of the fields that contemporary universities call social studies, e.g. https://fas.yale.edu/division-social-science.

In medieval times law was categorized alongside medicine and divinity as one of the three learned professions: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-03199-3_.... It’s not an academic field at all really, much closer to a trade.

Last time I checked --- this is a couple years ago --- the #1 feeder undergrad degree for law was English.

What does that have to do with what the field is rooted in?

(Proto-) Fascists and other reactionary types? They've been calling for this for decades...

Oh please. Not everyone to the left of a DSA cultural studies major is a “reactionary fascist.” Back in college my buddies (all engineers) mocked our industrial engineering friend for majoring in “imaginary engineering.” You can guess what we said about the underwater basket weaving majors. But we were all democrats (with a few libertarians mixed in).

I mentioned "(Proto-) fascists and other reactionary types" because that's one obvious answer to your question. I'm not implying that everyone who supports cutting liberal arts funding fits within that category.

> I expected to read something novel around increasing public investment in education, investing in infrastructure etc.

If that's what you expected, would it really have been novel?

What’s the basis of the assertion that protectionism doesn’t work?

Globalization has clearly done wonders for social stability and wealth generation. Yea let’s keep our heads in the sand that’ll work.