The Ledger, every show

“This was what was behind the political swing to the right in the late 19 seventies, early 19 eighties, when we got Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, because the more social democratic type of governments before that hadn't been able to restart productivity …”

“The golden age was actually the exceptional time. It's not normal that economies grow at a rapid pace. It's not normal that incomes double or triple or quadruple in the matter of just a few years, and I don't think we should expect that to recur.”

“But China's not going to grow at 10% a year for the next Half century. It's becoming much more like a normal, mature economy in which the growth rate is a couple of percent a year, and that's all they're going to be able to expect.”

“There are now probably three so-called alliances of container carriers that kind of dominate world trade. So we may be in an environment in which there are few enough players that they'll be able to have a better handle on prices, on shipping rates, and that w…”

“I believe that a lot of the improvement in our living standards really comes out of these kind of micro improvements at the private sector level, rather than as a matter of great policy.”

“Sometimes people who are involved in the tech industry kind of get very romantic about how quickly these great technologies are getting absorbed. But in reality, life is messy. And some of these technologies take a while to be used efficiently and some of them…”

“And so this innovation, the container that had really come about in the fifties started to make a substantial difference in the world economy in the 19 eighties when we had the birth of modern supply chains.”

“For decades and decades, we've trained people to believe that the government can provide a very steady income, can provide low unemployment, can provide rapid economic growth. And I think the government's ability to do this is limited. What we're seeing, I thi…”

“I'm not too concerned about that. I'm pretty confident that we'll have ways in which people can earn livings.”

“The period from To 1973 was probably the period of the fastest economic growth in the history of the world. GDP around the world grew at more than five percent a year.”

“If you look at past episodes of fast productivity growth, in general, they weren't predicted very well. For example, we had a spurt of productivity growth, which translated into, to faster income growth in the late nineties and the first years of the 2000. Thi…”

“For a lot of retailers, there's a problem here, because they're maintaining an internet business, they're also maintaining a retail store business, because some customers want that. So, in some cases, their costs have gone up. They have not become online retai…”

“When you are a big retailer, you can't change so easily, ok? If you own one store and you think you need to do something else, you go in there with a hammer and some plywood and you can do it. If you own a thousand stores, you're stuck, ok? You've got your loc…”

“International trade and manufactured goods actually grow more slowly than the world economy for the past six or seven years.”

“We know that as a general proposition, it's been important for economic growth that we've had scientific research going on. Does that mean that if we put more money into scientific research now that we will be able to benefit from the consequences at any predi…”

“There were countries around the world that literally went 25 years from 1948 to 1973 without a single year of recession.”