The Ledger, every show
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks, across all 44 shows. Pick shows below, then mix any filter with any other.
shows 
every show 44 of 44
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: Rising relative unemployment for college grads began in 2009
“Young graduates, relative unemployment started to rise in 2009 long before generative AI came along. So this trend long, long, long predates AI. It's been going on the relative unemployment of you know, college graduates relative to other people has been risin…”
Smith: Under 10% of US companies use AI in production
“Unofficial measure suggests that less than 10% of American companies employ AI to produce goods and services, so AI is probably not big enough to have, like, a major impact yet there.”
Smith: US provides cheaper food than most other countries
“America gets cheaper food than other countries do, and actually we do a pretty good job getting Food cheaply to poor people compared to like most countries”
Smith: Rising great powers historically fight small wars before large ones
“Like in the past, rising powers usually have a small war before the big war.”
Smith: Advanced tech alone does not win wars without scale
“Technology alone does not win wars as Germany found out in world war II when they had great rocket bombs and jet fighters. And that did absolutely nothing to help them win.”
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 …”