Noah Smith

“Noah Smith is sharing the job postings for software engineers have picked up since vibe coding became a thing. They had been declining until the early part of last year, actually.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“Eventually we may like people will come along and say, you know what? I could just organize my company entirely different to take more advantage of AI. And I don't just have to replace my humans with AI. I just have the humans do different things and the AI do…”

“So basically in our network, we have Paki McCormick, we have Noah Smith and Brian Hobart of a few other kind of pretty big newsletter writers for their specific niches who have a few 100,000 subscribers. And we say, Hey, you don't have a podcast today. Let's c…”

“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.”

“Economists often think to the very end and think about equilibrium and ignore the path for how you get there.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“Manufacturing employment shrank as a percent of the total workforce since 1945, but total manufacturing employment didn't.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”