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Offshoring is an inexact term, considering that firms were perfectly willing to seek deals on work in North America, too, by building plants in Mexico. In 1965, Fairchild opened a factory on the Navajo reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico, taking advantage of high unemployment with a low-wage “train…

That production chief was named Charlie Sporck, and at Fairchild, and subsequently at the spin-off National Semiconductor, he played an important role in directing the future of Silicon Valley and the American economy at large. In the early 1960s, only around five years after the company started, F…

As a productive part of the American capitalist economy, Stanford faced some of the same limitations that capitalism did as a system. It was, as an institution, invested in profit and existing property relations. As I’ll note in the rest of this section, in the electronics industry and way beyond, …

Baran was a professional peer and (at least) an intellectual equal of the leading liberal economists. During the war, he worked alongside Galbraith, who called him “one of the most brilliant, and by a wide margin, the most interesting economist I have ever known.”56 But whereas others were eager to…

“[T]he solution to the economic crisis of the end of the war turned out to be simply not letting the war end,” writes historian Walter Johnson.51 The Cold War was a real, long war, and millions of people died. To speak of the American “postwar” economy or state into the 1950s is not to talk about a…