Comeback: America's New Economic Boom
Charles R. Morris
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 1610393368
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The great economic boom times in American history have come because of fortuitous discoveries. Natural resources (coal first, then oil) fueled vast economic and industrial expansions, which in turn helped create and supply new markets. The last genuine economic game changer was the technology boom of the 1990s, which gave the U.S. a global competitive advantage for a while based on electronics and silicon. One of the first writers and analysts in the U.S. to predict that the tech boom would lead to a period of sustained economic growth was Charles Morris. In defiance of the recessionary times (in 1990), he saw the coming boom. Now, in 2013, he sees the threshold of another.
This time the gift is natural gas. The amount and distribution of gas in American shale is so vast that it has the potential to transform the manufacturing economy, creating jobs across the country, and requiring a new infrastructure that will benefit the nation as a whole. Because of fracking, jobs that once would have been outsourced abroad will return home, America can become a net exporter of energy, and cheap energy will provide the opportunity for innovation and competition.
In light of this new opportunity, and other complementary developments Morris explores in this book, the U.S. ought to be approaching the future with a robust self-confidence it has not experienced in a while. But we could fumble it away. The gold-rush style of shale boom companies does not make them good neighbors. A counter-reaction could put their industry, and the new era of national prosperity, at risk. We also have a political system that has the capacity to spoil the benefits of this huge boon. If the wealth locked in the continental shelf is not shared for the general economic good, but is instead exploited in short-term profiteering, then many of the opportunities that exist will be choked off by a few very rich corporations.
Managing the great bonus of the vast store of cheap energy is going to become a defining political challenge in the years ahead. At the threshold of a thrilling opportunity, Morris is a brilliantly perceptive guide.
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the forecasts. Dow itself restarted a long-mothballed ethylene plant unit in Louisiana in January of 2013; the company is also planning to open a new ethylene unit on the Gulf Coast in 2017, to build out more capacity in existing facilities in Louisiana and Texas, and to build a new Texas propylene plant, all in the near term. Formosa Plastics is planning a $1.5 billion expansion program in Texas, and Westlake Chemical is expanding its ethylene capacity in Louisiana and considering another unit
In addition, global companies like Shell and ExxonMobil, although they are headquartered in the United States, invest globally, wherever they can get the highest return. There is no guarantee that their foreign revenues will be recycled back to the United States. In fact, there is a real-life case that suggests that NERA’s and other conventional economic analyses are simply wrong. Australia has long been involved with natural gas and LNG exporting, but regulatory responsibility has been
prevent fluid spills. Consider a typical mundane but serious problem. The investigative journal ProPublica has been running a series on the shale industry for several years now. It recently reported that in the Bakken shale, truck drivers bringing waste fluids to treatment sites frequently dump their loads in vacant fields, especially at night and especially if there is a long line at the treatment location.3 On our visit to the Devon water treatment center, Sarah Terry-Cobo, the reporter on the
should demand environmentally sound behavior, at levels of inconvenience and cost that people are willing to tolerate, while constantly nudging up the bounds of their tolerance. Perversely, the catastrophist literature may just make that harder: if disaster is inevitably on its way—assuming we don’t carry out an agenda that looks impossible—then all environmentally friendly measures may seem pointless. Until quite recently, natural gas was assumed to be a major tool in slowing the pace of
the doldrums after losing patent protection on their last generation of blockbuster drugs. But at the same time, there are deeply engrained cost issues in American health care that must be solved if it is to fully realize its promise. With reasonable policies, public-sector-driven infrastructure and health care will complement and stimulate the growth in the private sector and ensure that it is more or less balanced across the entire economy. The final chapters offer thoughts on making that