There’s an excess “Fortunately” in this phrase

Professor Mazzucato tells us all proudly that:

Fortunately, industrial policy is back in favor around the world,

For those who get to sit in offices and design industrial policy it is, of course, as in favour as it ever was. The rest of us are going to - are getting - get it in the neck having to pay for this series of disasters.

We think of the American and EU ideas about electric vehicles. Vast subsidies to try to make them cheap so that people will buy them allied with vast taxes on any Johnny Foreigner with the temerity to make cheap electric vehicles that anyone wants to buy.

Or there’s this from the world of computer chip making:

Semiconductor manufacturing subsidies announced in the past 2 years:

US: $52 bln, India: $10 bln, Japan: $25 bln, EU: $46 bln, S Korea: $19 bln, UK: $1 bln, China: $47 bln

The subsidies are greater than the total costs of the next two, possibly three, generations of chip fabs. All to make fabs that are less than economic in size - as with the analysis that gained Paul Krugman his Nobel there really are industries where the efficient producer size is global.

Then of course there’s Our Own Dear HS2, £100 billion and counting to knock 10 minutes off the time - currently about an hour - from a suburb of London to a suburb of Birmingham.

That “fortunately” doesn’t really belong in that phrase now, does it?