"When Gene Sperling was in charge of coordinating the shaping and execution of the US government's economic policy in the Obama White House, he found himself surprised and dismayed when serious people in Washington worried out loud to him that the Obama focus on health care was a distraction...

National economic planning aims at defining strategic economic objectives and priorities for a country and designing longer term policies and institutional frameworks to achieve them. Complemented in some cases by industrial policies, economic planning is a dynamic attempt to change the...