Is there such a thing as MAD in economic warfare? How should we measure the effectiveness of our industrial policy tools, and what outcomes should we be aiming for anyway?

Our guest today is Dan Kim, who served at USITC with stints at Qualcomm and SK hynix before returning to government as the Chief Economist for the CHIPS Program Office. He recently joined TechInsights as Chief Strategy Officer. Also joining us is Chris Miller of Chip War fame.

We discuss:

• What $39 billion can and can’t buy — why the CHIPS Act was never meant to de-risk the U.S. from China or Taiwan, and what “success” looks like when autarky is neither affordable nor desirable,

• Apple vs. Xiaomi + BYD — invention versus fast-following as competing models of national power, and which system performs better when the goal shifts from profit maximization to geopolitical resilience,

• What resilience actually means — capability vs. capacity, weakest links, and whether economic security should be measured as “time to recovery” rather than self-sufficiency,

• Managed dependence vs. overreliance, and whether dependence itself can be a form of power,

• Why the U.S. still lacks a clear theory, metrics, and institutional design for industrial strategy — and what you can do about it.

Listen now on your favorite podcast app.

Getting Punched in the Mouth

Jordan Schneider: When you got the mandate to help conceptualize what the CHIPS Program Office should spend money on, what was your thought process? Where did you begin?

Dan Kim: Secretary Raimondo asked me to come in, and we had a chat about how to draft up a strategy from a blank piece of paper and execute it. We had congressional mandates — specifically spending at least $2 billion on mature node technologies — but few prescriptions for what success looked like or how to measure it.

Remember, this was in the middle of COVID-induced supply chain shortages. There were parking lots full of unfinished cars near Detroit. Some executives told me there were unfinished Carnival cruise ships — billion-dollar ships that couldn’t be finished because of $2,000 worth of accessory chips. When I was meeting with the Secretary while representing a company, the question was: how soon can you get another fab online? There wasn’t a recognition of a memory shortage at the time — it was mostly shortages of less advanced chips, like MCUs, that couldn’t finish ...