The Biden administration has pursued a new and ambitious economic agenda, premised on the notion that the prevailing orthodoxy of the past few decades — specifically, the imperative to embrace free markets and free trade — was inadequate to the needs of the U.S. economy.

Initial data from the Treasury Department suggests these policies have succeeded.

But two scholars who studied 50 years of American industrial policy concluded that the most successful efforts in the past, by far, were those that funded basic research and development and opened foreign markets to American goods. Those that promoted particular industries or implemented trade barriers proved to be costly failures.