Opinion
Smith: Predictions that AI will replace 40-60% of jobs are 'hooey'
“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 …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Smith: Government-run grocery stores will drain public funds and crush bodegas
“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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Smith: AI productivity boom requires reorganizing production processes, not replacing workers
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Smith: AI-vulnerable occupations continue rising as share of US jobs
“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…”
Assertion Contradicted
Smith: IBM fired workers for AI automation and had to rehire
“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,…”
Insight
Smith: Automating human tasks does not imply mass labor displacement
“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.”
Assertion Supported
Noah Smith: US Wage Inequality Has Decreased for Over Ten Years
“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. …”
Insight
Noah Smith: Mass deportations will not significantly raise native workers' wages
“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…”
Insight
Noah Smith: High-skilled immigration has strongly positive economic impact, unlike low-skilled
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Smith: China is manufacturing 100 nuclear weapons per year
“China's building a hundred nuclear weapons a year.”
Opinion
Smith: China is conducting the largest military buildup in world history
“And in absolute terms, the most impressive military buildup the world has ever seen ever is happening in China right now.”
Insight
Noah Smith: Social media drove polarization by eliminating geographic and ideological segregation
“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…”
Opinion
Smith: PMC socialism is America's most important political tendency today
“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”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Noah Smith: Trump immigration crackdown will have negative but modest economic impact
“I think the net impact of the Trump immigration crackdown will be fairly economically will be negative, but not huge.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Noah Smith: Tariff-driven inflation threat will keep Fed interest rates higher
“The threat of tariff-driven inflation will lead the Fed to keep interest rates higher a little longer, as we just saw with Powell.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Noah Smith: Tariffs and policy uncertainty will gradually erode US economic strength
“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.”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Supported
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”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
