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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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,…”

“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. …”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”