The Ledger, every show

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“This is complete hooey, and they all come up with really huge percentage, like, 40%, 60% of your jobs are gonna be replaced by AI, so, you know, every, there's a million groups doing this, and they'll come up with different things, and it's hooey for a number …”

“So if you make government run grocery stores, it'll do two things. Number one It will outcompete all the little indie grocery stores and bodegas, thus like a meager source of capital and wealth accumulation for like poor people in poor neighborhoods... And the…”

“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.”

“AI is, is better for diagnosis on a lot of things than humans, right?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“Returning to a measure reintroduced in two, 20, 23, we examine American data on employment by occupation, singling out workers that are believed to be vulnerable to AI. These are white collar employees, including people in back office support, financial operat…”

“So we saw this thing where IBM fired all these people because it thought they could replace their jobs with AI and then had to hire them all back, had to hire like a ton of people back. Maybe not the exact same people, not doing the exact same things, but for,…”

“Conceptually the idea of like, well, we made this thing to do all these tasks that humans do is not a, is not by itself a reason to think human labor is going to be masterplaced.”

“Right around the time that this thesis started becoming very well accepted and popular, wage inequality started to go down and wages started rising more at the bottom of the distribution than at the middle or top. And so we've seen that for now over 10 years. …”

“The reason why a flood of immigration does not really actually reduce wages is that immigrants are also buying things and the demand from buying things creates labor demand for native born people. And so, so immigrants really don't do much to wages. And what t…”

“When you look at the economic impact of low skilled immigration, it's not a lot. Either way. But when you look at the economic impact of high skilled immigration, it's strongly positive. So we're really playing with fire if we start kicking out the smart peopl…”

“China's building a hundred nuclear weapons a year.”

“And in absolute terms, the most impressive military buildup the world has ever seen ever is happening in China right now.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“They fail a lot more now than they used to. The success rate of taking places over has gone way down.”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“During the China shock when our manufacturing employment fell, our industrial production actually rose a bit.”

“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.”

“Every other tool that's ever been made, every other technological tool was a compliment to humans.”

“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.”

“I think it's primarily social media. I think that social media so, so I think that Americans, America was this very big, diverse country. You had ideological diversity. We had geographic diversity, not just like racial diversity, which is what we typically thi…”

“Barbara Ehrenreich called this PMC socialism. She called it professional, professional managerial class socialism. And a lot of people like infinite people have remarked on this tendency. I think it's the most important political tendency in America today”

“I think the net impact of the Trump immigration crackdown will be fairly economically will be negative, but not huge.”

“The threat of tariff-driven inflation will lead the Fed to keep interest rates higher a little longer, as we just saw with Powell.”

“I think that, that those will erode our economic strength in ways that don't look like an abrupt crash, but they'll look like data getting, like, a little bit worse and a little bit worse. That's my prediction, but again, hard to say.”

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

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“A lot of people are just thinking politically, and when you ask them, how's the economy, they think, do I like the president?”

“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.”

“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.”