The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 42 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Smith: US factory construction boomed under Biden after decades of stagnation
“But when you look at factory construction, real, real factory construction, you saw this enormous, you saw it basically flat at a flat level for decades and decades at a fairly low level. Then you saw this enormous boom during the Biden years and all the facto…”
Smith: Elon Musk is the only entrepreneur to scale US manufacturing
“Who's the only entrepreneur who's been able to successfully scale manufacturing in America, you know, even in the face of international competition, and it's been pretty credible because his supply chains are far more domestically sourced than most manufacture…”
Noah Smith: Smartphone technology is driving global fertility far below replacement
“Phones have destroyed the human race. Like, the fertility crash that's happening all around the world. Nobody has replacement level fertility. Fertility is going far below replacement everywhere because of technology.”
Noah Smith: AI companionship will cause human population to continually dwindle
“The human race does not have a desire, a collective desire to perpetuate itself. We can, you know, yes, we're going to get lonely, but we'll have company through AI and through the internet. Social media, you know, until there's just a few of us and we dwindle…”
Noah Smith: Most of Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI predictions have been proven wrong
“I would say that already most of the things he predicted have been invalidated or made irrelevant in the last year and a half, like, and especially in terms, like all the comp stuff about competition with China you know, like it turns out filtration was able t…”
Smith: Tariff threats against Japan and Europe ultimately help China win
“Hurting Japan and Europe more than we hurt ourselves, but hurting both of us actually just lets China win. So it doesn't seem like a credible threat to me.”
Smith: AI outperforms human doctors on many medical diagnoses
“AI is, is better for diagnosis on a lot of things than humans, right?”
Smith: Radiologist wages and employment rose after Hinton's automation prediction
“You also got Jeffrey Hinton's prediction that radiologists would be unemployed within a certain time frame, and by that time, radiologist wages were higher than ever, and employment was higher than ever.”
Noah Smith: AI Economy Will Fundamentally Redefine GDP Beyond Human Labor
“We're envisioning a radical shift of what GDP means to a sort of Internal pricing that a few overlords set for the things that their AI agents want to do, and that's incredibly different than what we'call GDP in the past.”
Smith: Chinese subsidies force BYD to rely on supplier loans
“We're seeing BYD having to take loans from its suppliers just to stay financially afloat, even though it's the best car company in the world because the Chinese government has paid A million other car companies to compete with BYD.”
Smith: Consumer Gains From Foreign Trade And Automation Are Functionally Identical
“In fact, in economic models, the gains from trade will look just like productivity. And there's a complete equivalence between those and a lot of models. So basically, if you have a robot to do something cheaply, you know, from the consumer's perspective, that…”
Smith: China Shock Displaced US Manufacturing Workers Into Low-Wage Service Jobs
“What Otter, Dorn, and Hansen found is that the adjustment of the average worker in competition with Chinese workers was much, much slower and worse, and they found that, you know, the average displaced manufacturing worker in the eighties and nineties who was …”
Smith: US Manufacturing Jobs Plunged After China Entered WTO In 2000
“Total manufacturing employment has shrunk since 2000 dramatically. So at the exact same time trying to enter the WTO, total manufacturing employment in the United States, which had been at a stable level for decades and decades, starts to plunge.”
Smith: The China Trade Shock Is Over As Labor Costs Equalize
“The China shock is over. China unit labor costs are now at parity with the United States labor cost, and there is nothing on the horizon that looks anything like China.”
Smith: Gross trade volume matters more than trade deficits
“People focus Obsessively on the trade deficits and surpluses, on the imbalances, on the net amount, but basically the more important effect is the gross, the total amount of exporting that we're able to do, you know, and so in that sense, trade between us and …”
Smith: Germany and South Korea maintain manufacturing despite demographic decline
“Observing countries like Germany and South Korea, where the manufacturing share of industry has remained remarkably high. So I see them with extremely low fertility rates, low rates of family formation, you know, skyrocketing divorce rates, and you know in Kor…”
Smith: US manufacturing indicators slumped following Trump tariff announcements
“Since Trump announced his quote unquote liberation day tariffs, we've seen deterioration in manufacturing PMIs purchasing orders you know, investment plans. Every indication of manufacturing you've had is slumping now and notably beginning directly after Trump…”
Smith: US should have used tariffs against China's 2000s currency undervaluation
“For example, if you had used tariffs as a kind of bargaining tool to force China to stop undervaluing the Yuan, which it did to a significant degree in the 2000. That might've worked. In fact, I think we should have done that.”
Smith: Shrinking trade deficits coincided with flatlining US manufacturing productivity
“Our trade deficit shrank enormously after 2008. However, that is when our manufacturing productivity flatlined, ok? And that is when our industrial output flatlined, is after 2008.”
Smith: US industrial production grew during China shock despite job losses
“During the China shock when our manufacturing employment fell, our industrial production actually rose a bit.”
Smith: US tariffs on China should target strategic industries, not clothing
“Not, not all the tariffs on, I would say strategic industries with China. I don't think we, you know, need tariffs on Chinese clothes because if China makes clothes, that's not a national security threat to us.”
Smith: Every historical technology has complemented rather than replaced humans
“Every other tool that's ever been made, every other technological tool was a compliment to humans.”
Noah Smith: AI reasoning models hallucinate endlessly and gaslight users
“I mean, the reasoning models still go off in these crazy hallucinations that they'll never, like, admit were wrong, and will just, like, gaslight you infinitely on some crap it made up. Like, they'll still, like, just knowing truth from falsehood.”
Smith: Economists Focus on Equilibrium While Ignoring Transition Paths
“Economists often think to the very end and think about equilibrium and ignore the path for how you get there.”
Smith: Access To Cheap Labor Reduces Incentives For Labor-Saving Innovation
“The natural implication of this is that basically the more cheap labor you get, the less incentive there is for labor-saving innovation, for entrepreneurs and technologists to invest in labor-saving innovation.”
Smith: TPP And TTIP Will Not Resemble The 2000s China Trade Shock
“People are talking about TPP and TTIP, which is basically a trade treaty with, you know, Japan and Korea, a trade treaty with Europe. Those are trade with rich countries, and that's not going to look at all like opening up trade with China did in the 2000. It …”
Smith: 2000s US Manufacturing Job Losses Coincided With Productivity Slowdown
“It wasn't until the 2000 that absolute manufacturing employment started to fall and that manufacturing employment started to fall along with manufacturing productivity slowing down.”
Smith: Economic Sentiment Is Driven By Presidential Approval Rather Than Data
“A lot of people are just thinking politically, and when you ask them, how's the economy, they think, do I like the president?”
Smith: Pre-WWI Britain And Germany Prove Trade Does Not Prevent War
“The idea that trade builds bonds between countries, I believe, is an overrated idea. Because on the eve of World War I, Great Britain and Germany were each other's largest trading partners.”
Smith: US Needs An Export Promotion Agency Like Japan's JETRO
“Japan does a lot of things wrong, but it also does some things right. And it has an export promotion agency called Jetro. If you're a small Japanese company, you don't know how to sell stuff to Bangladesh. Jetro will hook you up with local resources and will t…”
Smith: Technologies Like CRISPR And Driverless Cars Cannot Be Suppressed
“On this point, you can't stop technology. You can't suppress it. These things are coming. CRISPR is coming to design your baby someday. Driverless cars are coming.”
Smith: Trucker employment grew a decade after self-driving job loss forecasts
“There were two stories in the same year about truckers being mass unemployed by, you know, self-driving trucks, and then 10 years later, there's a trucker shortage, and the number of truckers we hire is higher than ever.”
Smith: Real-world political redistribution relies on inefficient market distortions
“In the real world, redistribution happens via things like the minimum wage or, you know, like letting the AMA decide how many doctors there's gonna be. So, so redistribution in the real world is not always the most efficient thing.”
Smith: Economists Lack a General Theory for Trade Adjustment
“To be honest, it's really not easy to tell when that will and won't happen, and there's no general theory that economists have about adjustment.”
Smith: Ancient Romans possessed steam engine technology without mass deployment
“And the Romans had all the technology for steam engines. They even did some mining with steam. A Roman inventor had a little steam engine on his desk called the alio pile, but they never really deployed it on mass.”
Smith: Rising Chinese Wages Will Drive A Return To Automation
“Maybe we took a one decade pause in automation, and maybe now that wages have risen so much in China and things like that, maybe now we're going to get back to the task of automation.”
Smith: US Workers Displaced By 80s Trade Found Equal Or Better Jobs
“When economists around in the late nineties and early 2000 went back and looked at those episodes, what they found is that the displaced workers Almost all found new jobs in doing very similar things for same or higher pay.”
Smith: Subsidies And Low Standards Drove China's Trade Competitiveness
“The reasons China was cheap, I mean, cheap wages were part of it, but they were subsidizing energy. They were giving everybody really cheap coal without worrying about the environmental impacts. They had very low labor standards, and they had a bank finance sy…”
Smith: Absolute US Manufacturing Employment Remained Stable From 1945 To 2000
“Manufacturing employment shrank as a percent of the total workforce since 1945, but total manufacturing employment didn't.”
Smith: Prime-Age Employment-To-Population Ratio Is The Best Labor Metric
“Employment to population ratio. The best labor market indicator. The best.”
Smith: China Has Stopped Undervaluing Its Currency And Is Selling Reserves
“China's no longer undervaluing its currency. That was very mercantilist. They were building up their U S dollars. They're like modern day gold. They were doing that in the 2000. They have stopped now and have actually been propping up their currency instead of…”
Smith: Entering Foreign Markets Increases Company Productivity
“So when a company... Enters a foreign market, it experiences a jump in productivity. Obviously, companies that were more productive to start with are going to be more competitive in foreign markets. There's pretty good evidence that exporting forces companies …”