Jason Potts

Today, I lectured on the economic history of fascism in my Global Economic History course. It is not a pleasant topic to discuss, but as I have mentioned before, I find it increasingly relevant. Tariffs as tools of statecraft, nationalist economic policies, the push for self-sufficiency in strategic goods, and the creation of closed economic blocs are back in the discussion. The slides are here: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/GEH_1… The situations are not equivalent (and far be it from me to make facile comparisons), but one cannot deny the parallels either. For example, is it a good idea for a regional hegemon to build an economic bloc and close it to trade with the rest of the world? Should a country seek to control the supply of critical inputs (oil and rubber in the 1930s, rare earths and advanced chips today) rather than buy them on world markets? What balance between power and rules should hegemons seek in international relations? How important are economies of scale in modern economic growth? The last question is particularly salient. Many alternatives to the liberal international order, from the 1930s to today, argue that economies of scale are crucial for a developing state and that achieving them “playing by the rules” is hard. For example, AI is the ultimate increasing-returns-to-scale technology, and nations without control of frontier models will run their economies, culture, and knowledge production on an “operating system” someone else designed. In a world like that, what is the optimal economic strategy of a middle-sized nation? As always, my goal in the lecture is not to provide answers, but to force students to think about these questions on their own.