Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe WI Isn't and I'm Tracy Alloway. Tracy obviously,
Speaker 1: one of our themes for like years now has essentially
Speaker 1: just been all of these ways in which it seems
Speaker 1: like the supply side of the economy is like kind
Speaker 1: of broken or put under review. I would say the
Speaker 1: pressure of the last two years has revealed a lot
Speaker 1: of weak points. Yeah, so I called this the choke
Speaker 1: point economy, um, which maybe I should have come up
Speaker 1: with a catchier title, but it was basically the idea
Speaker 1: that the extraordinary events of the pandemic had exposed the
Speaker 1: shortages or choke points in things that the economy actually
Speaker 1: really needs. Everything from semiconductors, which is kind of where
Speaker 1: we started our supply chain exploration two, I mean vaccines themselves, right,
Speaker 1: some countries couldn't get enough vaccines, others had too many,
Speaker 1: and you can expand it to tons of different things,
Speaker 1: everything from housing to healthcare. Right. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: this running joke of Odd Lots listeners on Twitter, and
Speaker 1: you're like, this is this is the new thing that's broken.
Speaker 1: When our Tracy and Joe going to do a show
Speaker 1: on it. But it also does you know when you
Speaker 1: when you have this like these myriad broken aspects of
Speaker 1: the supply chain or shortages or choke points or bottlenecks,
Speaker 1: you know, it's sort of like gets the question like
Speaker 1: is there like a bigger effort that can be made
Speaker 1: because you can, like you can tackle these one at
Speaker 1: a time, and of course that's being done in private
Speaker 1: companies and governmental work on that one at a time,
Speaker 1: But is there like a broader, a broader effort that
Speaker 1: can be made where large maybe government involvement, regulations, something
Speaker 1: such that we just have like more robust supply, more
Speaker 1: robust supply side of the economy. Absolutely, and I think
Speaker 1: for the past year or so we've certainly seen pockets
Speaker 1: and indications of that, right like the Biden administrations Build
Speaker 1: Back Better Program, the Inflation Reduction Act, all of those
Speaker 1: are to some extent aimed at increasing capacity, building out
Speaker 1: vital infrastructure and things like that. So it does feel
Speaker 1: like there is a recognition that this is an issue,
Speaker 1: but the solutions are still kind of tricky, and even
Speaker 1: if we all agree to build more capacity, it's going
Speaker 1: to take a while. There's still going to be questions
Speaker 1: over how best to do that. It's going to be
Speaker 1: tough to identify some of those cassidy constraints, like what
Speaker 1: actually is the constraint exactly? Um, you know, it's funny
Speaker 1: because for years there was, you know, supply side economics
Speaker 1: in modern parlance, has this very specific idea and I
Speaker 1: think of like the Reagan era and a bunch of
Speaker 1: people's economists who sort of made their bones in that era.
Speaker 1: But really it just made like tax cuts, like really
Speaker 1: like when people say supply side economics, they say tax cuts,
Speaker 1: tax cuts for companies make them more company, right, just
Speaker 1: make it easier for everyone to produce more by by
Speaker 1: cutting text. Now there is this sort of revival of
Speaker 1: so called supply side economics, a certain supply side progressivism.
Speaker 1: We've heard Jenny Yelling talk about it, which is no, actually,
Speaker 1: supply side economics doesn't have to just be tax cuts.
Speaker 1: It can actually be about all this the Chips Act, etcetera,
Speaker 1: active efforts in which the government, in theory can play
Speaker 1: a productive role in making more robust, resilient, and abundant
Speaker 1: supply side capacity, which speaks about the shortages the inflation
Speaker 1: that we're experiencing right now. And just like what does
Speaker 1: it mean to have an economy that just delivers more
Speaker 1: goods for the public. Yeah, and to some extent, it's
Speaker 1: almost a return to Kynesianism, right, It's about smoothing not
Speaker 1: business cycles necessarily, but smoothing like the investment cycle. If
Speaker 1: markets aren't doing it by themselves, then maybe the government
Speaker 1: can step in and say, actually, we need to build
Speaker 1: up this specific area of the economy or this particular
Speaker 1: piece of infrastructure. Absolutely. So, let's our guest today is
Speaker 1: someone who I think has been very influential on building
Speaker 1: out in public this idea of like a new supply
Speaker 1: side progressivism or reclaiming supply side economics is something that's
Speaker 1: beyond just cutting taxes or cutting interest rates and actually
Speaker 1: optimistic about the role that governments can play and alleviating
Speaker 1: some of these bottlenecks and shortages and you know, not
Speaker 1: running into all these scarcities again and just delivering more stuff,
Speaker 1: more housing, more goods for the public. We're going to
Speaker 1: be speaking to Ezra Cliin, columnist at the New York
Speaker 1: Times and the host the podcast The Asraclient Show. So
Speaker 1: uh big voice on this topic. Ezra, Thank you so
Speaker 1: much for coming on Odd lots will to be here
Speaker 1: on one of my favorite shows, thank You, Thank You.
Speaker 1: You know it's funny when we first talked about coming
Speaker 1: on the pot You're coming on the podcast, He's like, well,
Speaker 1: the Democrats build back better climate plan. It's it's completely failed,
Speaker 1: so let's talk about where they go next. But I
Speaker 1: guess you in saying that a completely side like this
Speaker 1: is like what duped Mitch McConnell and why they sort
Speaker 1: of got this done because the Democrats did a very
Speaker 1: convincing job convincing the public that it had failed and
Speaker 1: then only to turn around at the very last minute.
Speaker 1: So we had to sort of like rescrap even what
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about because the premise of our
Speaker 1: initial plan was undermined by the fact that the Democrats
Speaker 1: passed Yeah. I didn't mean to rope you into my
Speaker 1: ultimately completely successful scheme to pass the inflation production that,
Speaker 1: but but you know, they had to do all damage
Speaker 1: in this kind of work. So okay, maybe just to
Speaker 1: begin with, give us like the definition what what is
Speaker 1: modern supply side economics or supply side liberalism versus uh,
Speaker 1: you know, demand side economics, and also the supplied side
Speaker 1: economics of your the you know, the things that are
Speaker 1: often considered a dirty word associated with Reagan tax cuts,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. Yeah, the definitional work is always
Speaker 1: little trick here. So modern supply side economics is johnet
Speaker 1: Yellen picking up sort of some of this framing and
Speaker 1: and bring it into Treasury and around the Biden agenda,
Speaker 1: and we can we can talk about that, but sort
Speaker 1: of before that, what I've been trying to push for
Speaker 1: a while what I call supply side liberalism. It's pretty simple. Um, Look,
Speaker 1: I'm a liberal. I have spent most of my career
Speaker 1: arguing and still argue that we should subsidize this for that,
Speaker 1: do that cash transfer, expand health insurance to more people.
Speaker 1: But liberals, i think, over decades, have become very used
Speaker 1: to looking at the economy and looking at demand side problems,
Speaker 1: looking for what we can subsidize a solution. Right. Do
Speaker 1: people need health insurance, Let's give them a check to
Speaker 1: get more health insurance. That's fundamentally Obamacare. Do they need housing,
Speaker 1: let's give them a section eight boucher. Do they need schooling?
Speaker 1: How about a Pelgram. What we're not as good at
Speaker 1: is looking and seeing first where the problem is a
Speaker 1: supply problem, we don't have enough of the thing we
Speaker 1: want to give people um or the thing doesn't exist
Speaker 1: at all, because pulling technology forward to me is a
Speaker 1: very very important piece of supply side liberalism. Um. And secondarily,
Speaker 1: we don't have very good language and certainly not very
Speaker 1: good attentiveness to seeing when our own policies have made
Speaker 1: a supply side choke point worse, where say subsidizing something
Speaker 1: like maybe housing in very hot housing areas, where we've
Speaker 1: also constrained the supply and thus we're pushing up prices
Speaker 1: for everybody. So part of this is trying to add
Speaker 1: a new lens or an old lens. Maybe many people
Speaker 1: would say from new deal liberalism to sort of modern liberals,
Speaker 1: men say, a lot of the problems now are supply
Speaker 1: side problems, and we need both language and policies for
Speaker 1: fixing them. So the liberal or progressive impulse remains the same,
Speaker 1: which I imagine would be characterized as some sort of
Speaker 1: more egalitarian distribution of the fruits that the economy produces.
Speaker 1: So whether it's literal things, whether it's homes, whether it's
Speaker 1: child care and healthcare, like the more equal distribution of
Speaker 1: these things, the goal is the same. But we're used
Speaker 1: to talking about, Well, the way to do that is checks,
Speaker 1: so that someone can have a voucher for childcare or something,
Speaker 1: but in a capacity constrained environment. And I you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that didn't get into the IRA
Speaker 1: I believe was anything having to do with childcare. And
Speaker 1: in theory it sounds like, yeah, sure you could like
Speaker 1: give people check and give people more access to childcare,
Speaker 1: but without more childcare facilities, without more teachers, without more
Speaker 1: people who can look after children, you're gonna just run
Speaker 1: into constraints. You may not actually get the outcomes that
Speaker 1: you're you're hoping to see. Yeah, a hundred percents. Let
Speaker 1: me say two things about that. So number one, I
Speaker 1: don't want to say this is simply about distribution. A
Speaker 1: lot of it is about the ability to have flourishing
Speaker 1: lives in ways where we don't currently have the thing
Speaker 1: we want to distribute. So if you think of, say,
Speaker 1: what is happening in the i RA with a lot
Speaker 1: of the clean energy infrastructure they want to build, some
Speaker 1: of that is of course making it easier to get
Speaker 1: things we have today. Actually, you're really not going to
Speaker 1: be able to use these subsidies for the current generation
Speaker 1: of vv cars, but in theory an electric car subsidy
Speaker 1: could get you an electric car soon. Though we can
Speaker 1: talk about supply bottle next air, but much of what
Speaker 1: that is doing is trying to create clean energy options.
Speaker 1: It don't really exist right now. UM certainly at the
Speaker 1: level of plentitude, we need them to exist, things like
Speaker 1: hydrogen um you know, things like next generation. You know,
Speaker 1: basically pick your next generation energy source. They're trying to
Speaker 1: least subsidize it somewhat. So I do want to know
Speaker 1: that the ability to pull forward um innovations and possibilities
Speaker 1: that would allow for all kinds of goals that that
Speaker 1: that I have, that that many I think liberals share
Speaker 1: that could not be achieved now or the politics of
Speaker 1: them would not work out now. I think it's an
Speaker 1: important piece of it, and it gets too things that
Speaker 1: might need to be rethought or thought through on the
Speaker 1: level of institutions and grant science funding. But then your
Speaker 1: other piece of it on childcare, I think is exactly
Speaker 1: right and a lot of the for me, I mean,
Speaker 1: I live in San Francisco, California. I come from California.
Speaker 1: I grew up in Irvine, California, so I to watch
Speaker 1: how liberal, how blue California is, and how badly it
Speaker 1: fails at a lot of the basics of progressive outcomes
Speaker 1: of making a middle class life affordable for people is
Speaker 1: to really force yourself to reckon with some things that
Speaker 1: have gone pretty profoundly wrong in liberal governance. And one
Speaker 1: of them is, yeah, we have looked around. We keep
Speaker 1: seeing demand side problems, and we don't see the role
Speaker 1: that some of our governance institutions and other things have
Speaker 1: created on supply side, with housing in California and in
Speaker 1: New York and another kind of rich or blue areas
Speaker 1: being I think example number one, but but child care
Speaker 1: being another. You can talk about higher education. We've not
Speaker 1: built a new UC in California. There is an amazing, amazing,
Speaker 1: amazing like jewel of like the global public education system.
Speaker 1: We've not built a new UC here since the sixties.
Speaker 1: Except from me said, um, it is very Once you
Speaker 1: begin looking at the paucity of ambition on the supply side,
Speaker 1: it becomes a little bit hard to stop seeing it.
Speaker 1: So I'm just going to jump in real quickly and
Speaker 1: ask one of the devil's advocate questions. You know, one
Speaker 1: of the traditional criticisms of this kind of government intervention
Speaker 1: would be that, well, why not just let the free
Speaker 1: markets do it? You know, the free markets should be
Speaker 1: efficiently allocating resources to the things that we need, like
Speaker 1: housing and healthcare and childcare and things like that. What's
Speaker 1: your response to that criticism? Wouldn't it be nice? There
Speaker 1: are places here where I do think the regulation is
Speaker 1: a big part of the solution. So I think housing
Speaker 1: has a very very big component where if we let
Speaker 1: the market do more of the work, the market actually
Speaker 1: respond not immediately, not perfectly, but help a lot better
Speaker 1: than what we've allowed to have happen in places like, um,
Speaker 1: you know, northern California. On the other hand, there are
Speaker 1: things where the market won't do it, So I think
Speaker 1: clean energy being a big example. Now increasingly over time
Speaker 1: you have enough market signals being sent that there is
Speaker 1: a lot of investment in clean energy. But it took
Speaker 1: a long time, and we're nowhere near where we would
Speaker 1: have wanted to be in terms of the market deciding that,
Speaker 1: you know, ruining the planet is actually a bad thing
Speaker 1: for long term for for long term profits, So that
Speaker 1: kind of thing is not nearly as punished as one
Speaker 1: would hope that to be. I actually think a huge
Speaker 1: amount of the shift towards industrial policy and that I'm
Speaker 1: trying of coalition. The shift towards believing that the government
Speaker 1: does need to be able to set long term goals,
Speaker 1: does need to be able to infuse the productive policy
Speaker 1: and direction of the country with the values of the
Speaker 1: polity comes from watching the market's failure on climate. So
Speaker 1: one difficulty of this kind of of this way of
Speaker 1: looking at the economy is it doesn't give you a
Speaker 1: one size fits all policy solution. A little bit unlike
Speaker 1: the old supplies side economics reagular or supplies side economics,
Speaker 1: where you just sort of wandered around looking for taxes
Speaker 1: to cut and companies to deregulate. There are places here
Speaker 1: where you need to deregulate the private sector, places we
Speaker 1: need to deregulate the government, um places here where you
Speaker 1: need to spend more, places here where you actually need
Speaker 1: to spend less. It's much more playing bottleneck detective and
Speaker 1: asking what is something we wish we had more of,
Speaker 1: or simply wish we had altogether, right, it's something where
Speaker 1: we really should be investing a lot of money and
Speaker 1: trying to make some kind of technological breakthrough or make
Speaker 1: something affordable that is not currently affordable, and then trying
Speaker 1: to ask what is standing in the way um and
Speaker 1: that answer, very frustratingly, is extremely different for for different things.
Speaker 1: As I begun doing this work and it sort of
Speaker 1: I'm working on a book in this era area, you
Speaker 1: really have to look at different case studies and you
Speaker 1: can't extrapolate across the entire range from them. They just
Speaker 1: begin to overtime accumulate to a sense of a way
Speaker 1: of looking for a problem as opposed to a singular
Speaker 1: way of again and again solving a problem. So this
Speaker 1: is really key because you know, whether we're talking about
Speaker 1: all right, the old supply side just cut as many
Speaker 1: taxes as you can. This sort of traditional progressive demand
Speaker 1: side is well where there's a group of people who
Speaker 1: have inability to access something, cut a check, and both
Speaker 1: of them may have their roles, but the solutions aren't
Speaker 1: clearly as simple when we're talking about something as sprawling
Speaker 1: as lack of supply side capacity. And your turn, bottle
Speaker 1: neck Detective is good in all of these things. We
Speaker 1: talked about them all the time on the show. You
Speaker 1: know it's like, okay, we seem to have gotten bad
Speaker 1: at chips manufacturing. There are a lot of people waiting. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, last year we saw dwell times at the
Speaker 1: Port of Los Angeles each weeks because we didn't have
Speaker 1: uh pork throughput. It's like one thing after another, and
Speaker 1: as you say, they're all very different. But what is
Speaker 1: a good bottleneck. Are there certain broad principles that a
Speaker 1: good bottleneck bottle neck detective could have that would start
Speaker 1: to like, you know, a general theory perhaps of being
Speaker 1: a bottleneck detective six that you start finding these and
Speaker 1: identifying good solutions in a timely in a good rhythm. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so, um, and I'll that brings up a lot.
Speaker 1: So let me say a couple of things, uh quickly.
Speaker 1: So what is one dimension of this is outcomes people
Speaker 1: actually want? Right when people organized to stop dense development
Speaker 1: from coming into their community, that isn't some accident. They
Speaker 1: actually want the outcome we're getting. Now, we may say
Speaker 1: that as a as a political system, as a polity,
Speaker 1: as the state, as opposed to the city, we don't
Speaker 1: want that, and we're going to try to pull the
Speaker 1: responsibility or pull the voice away from them. But but
Speaker 1: that's a case where you're looking at we have many many, many, many,
Speaker 1: many institutions meant to raise up different voices, particularly than
Speaker 1: not only marginalized voices. A lot of this comes out
Speaker 1: of a sort of liberal counter movement in the sixties
Speaker 1: and seven and these you know your Ralph Nader, is
Speaker 1: your Rachel Carson's, etcetera. UH that was correctly responding to
Speaker 1: a period not just in American politics, but in liberalism
Speaker 1: where the building really was quite heedless, where the needs
Speaker 1: of communities really were run over, where people really were
Speaker 1: dumping toxic poisons into streams and into waterways and into
Speaker 1: the air with no real look at what it might mean.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of institutions, a lot of nonprofits,
Speaker 1: a lot of statutes were passed to make it easier
Speaker 1: for people to to jump in front, to be conservative
Speaker 1: about it, to jump in front of these UH mechanisms,
Speaker 1: and you'll stop. And now, at a time when we
Speaker 1: need to do things really fast, say to de carbonize,
Speaker 1: those exact same problems, I'm sorry, those exact same solutions
Speaker 1: have become today's problems. So it's part of it is
Speaker 1: looking for you know what I think of his institutional crusts. Right,
Speaker 1: where do we have long running processes that were maybe
Speaker 1: passed correctly, or maybe passed with all good intentions, or
Speaker 1: maybe passed and even solve the problems there are meant
Speaker 1: to solve, but have now become captured for other reasons.
Speaker 1: One piece I did that I think is a good
Speaker 1: example of this is in New York, and I think
Speaker 1: it's twenty nineteen, they pass congestion pricing, which is like
Speaker 1: the most pro environmental idea you can possibly have. You're
Speaker 1: gonna tax cars coming into New York City and you're
Speaker 1: gonna move that money over to the m p A.
Speaker 1: And congestion pricing has been held up now for four
Speaker 1: years an environmental review because and I've spoken to the
Speaker 1: Biden administration and I've spoken to the players in New
Speaker 1: York about this, and everybody wants to get it done.
Speaker 1: And what you'll hear is like, well, we're just afraid
Speaker 1: we're going to get a lot of lawsuits, and so
Speaker 1: we have to do this, you know, very very lengthy
Speaker 1: environmental review with all these meetings to protect ourselves, which
Speaker 1: is fine on some level, but on another level, when
Speaker 1: you're environmental bills are blocking pro environmentalist policies, you have
Speaker 1: to begin to ask what has gone wrong there? And
Speaker 1: so another place I just look at is affordability. When
Speaker 1: you have a big affordability problem, and I think we
Speaker 1: know where we have very big affordability problems. We have
Speaker 1: them in many areas in housing, we have them in childcare,
Speaker 1: we have them in higher education, we have them in healthcare.
Speaker 1: I think that is a place to begin looking um
Speaker 1: for supply side problems as well. Now you'll get different
Speaker 1: ones in different spaces there. But I think just in general,
Speaker 1: and we can talk about this more broadly, I think
Speaker 1: just affordability crises should be a signal that something has
Speaker 1: gone wrong. If there's a reason we can't produce more
Speaker 1: of a thing, well, okay, like fair enough, but a
Speaker 1: lot of those things we know there's no you know,
Speaker 1: it's not like the only way to get more childcare
Speaker 1: centers is to get more lithium out of China, right.
Speaker 1: I mean, we we have like the technological means to
Speaker 1: set up a daycare. If there aren't enough daycares, then
Speaker 1: the question of why becomes very salient and should be
Speaker 1: an answerable question. I just had a vision of a
Speaker 1: daycare with all these little toddlers like driving tiny electric
Speaker 1: vehicles around, and this is a future liberals want, okay,
Speaker 1: But I just want to pause and dwell on that
Speaker 1: timeline aspect of it for a second, because I think
Speaker 1: this is really important. And you know, Joe mentioned this
Speaker 1: idea that tax cuts can be an attractive policy solution
Speaker 1: because you know, they're pretty one size fits all, the
Speaker 1: same for cutting people checks like those are fairly simplistic
Speaker 1: answers to sometimes complicated problems. But when you talk about
Speaker 1: increasing investment um and building out capacity, it does feel
Speaker 1: like the timeline starts to look very different. Like the
Speaker 1: speed at which you can do that versus just cutting
Speaker 1: a check or reducing taxes is vastly, vastly different. So
Speaker 1: how do you overcome that? Because, especially in an inflationary environment,
Speaker 1: you have people who really want to see things that
Speaker 1: are going to have an immediate impact versus waiting two
Speaker 1: or four years for new housing supply to be built
Speaker 1: out or something like that. So this becomes a cliche
Speaker 1: example if you use it enough, and I probably have,
Speaker 1: but I think it's always worth remembering that it doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be that long. We built the Empire State
Speaker 1: Building in about a year um we built the New
Speaker 1: York Subways in if I'm remembering the number that the
Speaker 1: early New York subways in about four. It takes us
Speaker 1: longer than the and that now to open a bathroom
Speaker 1: in a subway station. So there is a delta, a
Speaker 1: pretty tremendous delta between what we've been able to do
Speaker 1: as a poorer country with worst building technology, what other
Speaker 1: countries that are poorer and have worst building technology than
Speaker 1: us were able to do, and what we're able to
Speaker 1: do now. Some of that is reasonable, right, we want
Speaker 1: to build things more safely now, we want to build
Speaker 1: things up to higher code now. And some of it
Speaker 1: you have to ask is it is it really serving us?
Speaker 1: So part of it is asking this question of are
Speaker 1: we our time and simply too long now? I think Tracey,
Speaker 1: you're also getting it something a little bit separate than that,
Speaker 1: which is within the horizon of political accountability. How quickly
Speaker 1: can you execute a policy that you may get rewarded for?
Speaker 1: And that's a hard question, although I would have thought
Speaker 1: two years ago in a way it was a harder
Speaker 1: question than I think it is now, not because you
Speaker 1: are able to build more quickly now, but because my
Speaker 1: estimation of how much reward there is for um tax
Speaker 1: policies basically has gotten pretty far down. So I think
Speaker 1: the the expectation among the Biden administration, and to be honest,
Speaker 1: my expectation was the child tax credit, which was a
Speaker 1: very simple, like direct, like here's a check, policy would
Speaker 1: be very popular and it would create a feedback loop
Speaker 1: of its own popularity which would lead to its extension.
Speaker 1: It did not do that. Um, it just did not
Speaker 1: do that. And if you go over the past couple
Speaker 1: of years, it's actually very hard to find big tax
Speaker 1: side policies that seem to have created a very strong
Speaker 1: political feedback effects. The Trump tax cuts in eighteen didn't
Speaker 1: do all that much for for Donald Trump. You know,
Speaker 1: we can argue about the stimulus checks and the Cares
Speaker 1: Act and and in the um subsequent um you know
Speaker 1: acts too, but it really doesn't look like it's saved
Speaker 1: anybody's bacon exactly. So I actually find this worrying for
Speaker 1: a bunch of other reasons that I think there is
Speaker 1: a very very very tenuous connection now between the policies
Speaker 1: either side passes and political and the political feedback's rewards
Speaker 1: or accountability for them. Um. The real exception is being
Speaker 1: when you make a policy highly salient through a very
Speaker 1: big repeal fight like Obamacare but the but in general,
Speaker 1: it isn't clue to me that politicians are getting obviously
Speaker 1: rewarded for the tax side policies either, So you know,
Speaker 1: you may as well try to do a good job. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, speaking of policies, let's just pause right here,
Speaker 1: because we did have two pretty extraordinarily big pieces of
Speaker 1: legislation passed in the last I don't know, two months basically,
Speaker 1: And you are the original wonk, and you made your
Speaker 1: career because you're extremely good at sort of taking these
Speaker 1: big policy things and writing about them and talking about
Speaker 1: them in a way that people can understand. So these
Speaker 1: two bills, Chips and I ra Someone comes to you, says, Ezrael, like,
Speaker 1: what's in these bills? What do they do? What are
Speaker 1: they gonna do for me? How are they going to
Speaker 1: expand supply side capacity? Why do you give us like
Speaker 1: this short, asra klient summary of these pretty extraordinary legislative
Speaker 1: accomplishments that up until very recently people thought there was
Speaker 1: no chance of this administration getting sure. And I think
Speaker 1: we should actually put the infrastructure bill in here too.
Speaker 1: So if you if you take the three of them together,
Speaker 1: what you have is about four hundred and fifty billion
Speaker 1: dollars in climate investment UM, roughly three five in the
Speaker 1: ira A. UM. It's really weird to keep saying the
Speaker 1: I r A and the Irish UH, and then a
Speaker 1: fair amount more in the Infrastructure bill. And then Chips
Speaker 1: has a bunch of you know, we're going to set
Speaker 1: up an agency, inter agency process, that kind of department. Here,
Speaker 1: we're going to give a direction, but they don't actually
Speaker 1: authorize the money for it, or rather, in technical terms,
Speaker 1: they authorize the money, but they don't spend the money.
Speaker 1: The other ones are actually like, here's a check. One
Speaker 1: tricky thing about these bills is none of them do
Speaker 1: one thing as a want. I find them very very
Speaker 1: hard to explain because there is no central architecture. But
Speaker 1: the major happened, I know, right well, I've I've moved
Speaker 1: on much easier, UM. But I would say there's been
Speaker 1: a huge move in climate policy. And and this goes
Speaker 1: actually a little bit too to the question of letting
Speaker 1: the market work. You go back to you know, two
Speaker 1: thousand and um, what was it two ten or eleven
Speaker 1: when they were doing uh Boxman market, the Big Captain
Speaker 1: Trade Bill. The theory for a long time was we
Speaker 1: were going to price the externalities of carpon as such,
Speaker 1: the market would then begin sending signals across the entire
Speaker 1: market so that the response from from both government and
Speaker 1: consumers and private uh you know, companies would be to
Speaker 1: begin investing much more in clean energy and infrastructure for
Speaker 1: clean energy and products that use clean energy, and you know,
Speaker 1: less in things that they used a lot of fossil
Speaker 1: fuels for a bunch of reasons. There's been a big
Speaker 1: movement away from that. And so now what they're trying
Speaker 1: to do in the i RA and to some degree
Speaker 1: in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill is there they're trying to
Speaker 1: sort of wander around with checks, with tax rebates, with
Speaker 1: tax credits and say, look like, if you can set
Speaker 1: up domestic and it's actually pretty important because they are
Speaker 1: putting a lot into the bucket of not just trying
Speaker 1: to create clean energy infrastructure and supply chains and product chains,
Speaker 1: but create them in America. If you can create enough
Speaker 1: of this chain here, like, we will give you a
Speaker 1: tremendous amount of you know, subsidies or will be guaranteed
Speaker 1: purchasers or whatever it might be. So they're basically just
Speaker 1: trying to spend their way to a very very very
Speaker 1: large UH decarbonization both UM push but also industry in America.
Speaker 1: I really think you have to understand what Biden is
Speaker 1: doing here as also an idea about the future of
Speaker 1: the economy. And I've been thinking about how will we
Speaker 1: know in ten years of this world. One way to
Speaker 1: think about it is we will know because we will
Speaker 1: have gotten you know. I think the estimate out of
Speaker 1: the group in Princeton and others is about two thirds
Speaker 1: of the way to the Paris climate. UM are are
Speaker 1: our target under Paris Climate. I think another way though
Speaker 1: that that I think, you know, if it doesn't happen,
Speaker 1: we're all going to have to answer for it a bit.
Speaker 1: Is is there a really strong domestic next generation battery
Speaker 1: manufacturing sector in America. They're putting a lot of money
Speaker 1: into that and some other things like that, and if
Speaker 1: those industries don't build up here, then there will be
Speaker 1: a real you know, that would be a real point
Speaker 1: for the people who say, you know, you can't use
Speaker 1: industrial policy to create these kinds of industries. That's one
Speaker 1: layer of this. The bills do a bunch of other
Speaker 1: things that should be said, so there's a huge amount
Speaker 1: of tax policy in the IRA to pay for not
Speaker 1: just the climate investments, but also to um uh, just
Speaker 1: pay down the deficit a bunch, to make Joe Mansion
Speaker 1: and to sunder Christian cinema happy. I would want to
Speaker 1: bone up on that more before I talked it through
Speaker 1: right here. And then there's obviously a fair amount of
Speaker 1: extension of Obamacare health insurance subsidies. Chips um is primarily
Speaker 1: a little bit to the side of this CHIPS. It
Speaker 1: comes out of competes and the I think it was
Speaker 1: called the Competition and Invasion Act, this huge Christmas tree
Speaker 1: kind of legislation for every R and D idea and
Speaker 1: domestic manufacturing idea anybody in Congress had that eventually got
Speaker 1: whittled down to primarily being an idea about reconstructing domestic
Speaker 1: semiconductor manufacturing and innovation, with the idea being these are
Speaker 1: such a critical component of the both the current and
Speaker 1: the next generation economy that to be dependent on other
Speaker 1: countries for them, partically other countries either they don't like us,
Speaker 1: or that could be easily invaded by countries a tone
Speaker 1: that that we have a complicated relationship with like Taiwan,
Speaker 1: UM is a critical national security, uh, not just failure,
Speaker 1: but vulnerability. And so I think Chips sits a little
Speaker 1: bit differently, whereas the IRA, I think of it is
Speaker 1: very much like a supply side progressivism bill. Right, We're
Speaker 1: going to invest hugely in the supply side of this
Speaker 1: very very central progressivism no goal, which is decarbonizing the
Speaker 1: economy and slowing climate change. Chips is very much am
Speaker 1: a national security. You know, the two parties can still
Speaker 1: somewhat come together to try to pass anti China or
Speaker 1: compete with China kind of legislation, and there are two
Speaker 1: a little bit like batteries are gonna be a really
Speaker 1: big test for for the IRA, whether not we're able
Speaker 1: to create the semiconductor capability and industry in America is
Speaker 1: going to be a really big test of whether or
Speaker 1: not it is possible for this kind of industrial policy
Speaker 1: to work. So, speaking of China, that's my queue to
Speaker 1: ask another Devil's advocate question, which is, you know, normally
Speaker 1: when I think of large scale investment or infrastructure spending
Speaker 1: things like that, I think of China, and China has
Speaker 1: sort of a mixed record on success on that front.
Speaker 1: UM And my favorite example of this is um the
Speaker 1: swine fever epidemic where a huge chunk of China's supply
Speaker 1: of pigs got wiped out by this pandemic, and then
Speaker 1: the government intervened and said, we have to rebuild our herds,
Speaker 1: and then they rebuilt them so quickly that they had
Speaker 1: too many pigs, and we had a bunch of pig
Speaker 1: farmers and pig farming companies that ended up going bust.
Speaker 1: And so if you look at the supply of China's
Speaker 1: heard of hogs, as I do regularly, it's just it's
Speaker 1: spikes and then it troughs. All made hobbies, right, and
Speaker 1: then it spikes and it troughs. So for them it's
Speaker 1: been very hard to smooth that particular cycle. And so
Speaker 1: I guess my question is, like, how difficult is it
Speaker 1: to calibrate this kind of supply side intervention and how
Speaker 1: do you ensure that you don't contribute to a boom
Speaker 1: that then ends in a bust? I think you might.
Speaker 1: I have two thoughts on this one. It goes back
Speaker 1: to something you were saying at the beginning, Tracy, about
Speaker 1: this in some ways being a rediscovery of Kanes people.
Speaker 1: You know, it posts great recession thought a lot about
Speaker 1: Kanes in terms of smoothing business cycles. But I in
Speaker 1: many ways think of the central contribution of modern monetary
Speaker 1: theory to tart discourse, being that the rediscovery and the
Speaker 1: central and central focus on the old Kanes quote. Whatever
Speaker 1: we can actually do we can afford to do, which
Speaker 1: I might have slightly wrong in in memory. But after that,
Speaker 1: all my my new KEYNESI and friends, you know, you're
Speaker 1: Larry Summers and Jason Furman's and everybody said, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: we've always believed that, and well you never never mentioned it.
Speaker 1: Actually it was not something you all said. But to
Speaker 1: take to to open up that quote a little bit.
Speaker 1: There are things we want to do that we cannot
Speaker 1: currently do. We either don't have the capacity, we don't
Speaker 1: have the market, we don't have the manufacturing skill and
Speaker 1: the supply chains, and we worry those chains are gonna
Speaker 1: be vulnerable to future geopolitical shock. And so there is
Speaker 1: a real effort here, I think, not to smooth out right.
Speaker 1: I mean, as you say, China had a pig industry, right,
Speaker 1: they they did have hogs. We just don't have a
Speaker 1: lot of the capacity we want to have, and so
Speaker 1: the theories to build it now I do think the worry,
Speaker 1: which is similar, is we will build the wrong things.
Speaker 1: You know, We'll put all this money into e v s,
Speaker 1: but it turns out everybody is going to be on
Speaker 1: the bikes, you know, or something, and so the government
Speaker 1: will in picking its you know, winners, have actually picked
Speaker 1: up a bunch of losers. And this gets to something else.
Speaker 1: And I talk a lot about supply side liberalism, but
Speaker 1: there's a lot of pickup for this idea on the right,
Speaker 1: and a lot of people on the right like to say, yeah, like,
Speaker 1: you know, finally liberals are taken, are taken the supply
Speaker 1: side seriously, and there's a pretty deep critique and for me,
Speaker 1: a pretty deep frustration towards my conservative friends, who on
Speaker 1: the one hand want a government that plays a more
Speaker 1: serious and I think risk tolerant role in backing up
Speaker 1: and accelerating the frontier or expanding the frontier of the
Speaker 1: supply chain. And on the other hand, they have themselves
Speaker 1: created an unbelievably risk intolerant, terrified of its own shadow government.
Speaker 1: So whether you're thinking about you know, things like the
Speaker 1: loan guarantee program that everybody knows from backing Cylindra, but
Speaker 1: that also was an incredibly important lifeline to Tessa. Or
Speaker 1: you're thinking about things like the incredibly heavy level of
Speaker 1: peer review and consensus oriented decision making at the NIH
Speaker 1: or the n S, which I think of as pretty
Speaker 1: big problems for a bunch of things I care about.
Speaker 1: But these places are terrified of funding things that then
Speaker 1: members of Congress on the right get up and say,
Speaker 1: what a stupid thing. These are shrimp running on treadmills
Speaker 1: or whatever. It is a lot of science looks weird.
Speaker 1: We need a government that the role government should be
Speaker 1: playing in a lot of these areas is to be
Speaker 1: investing in things that might fail to to your point
Speaker 1: about the government earlier, I'm sorry the market earlier. There
Speaker 1: are things the market does really well, and the market
Speaker 1: is really really really good at betting on things that
Speaker 1: are pretty likely to turn a profit. And there are
Speaker 1: places where maybe we need to deregulate or places we
Speaker 1: need to give a little push or make things a
Speaker 1: little bit easier. But in general, you know, if you
Speaker 1: didn't do anything on electric vehicles right now, the market
Speaker 1: is moving in that direction, maybe a little slowly, you know,
Speaker 1: compared to what we were like, but it is definitely
Speaker 1: moving in that direction, um with of course we should
Speaker 1: say a huge amount of government help up until now, um.
Speaker 1: But there are things that are just too risky. There
Speaker 1: are things that just you know, if they haid off,
Speaker 1: it would be unbelievably great, but they very likely won't
Speaker 1: pay off. And we need a government able to make
Speaker 1: a lot of bets like that and absorb not just financially,
Speaker 1: a bunch of failure. But and this is a much
Speaker 1: harder part, and the part where the right place a
Speaker 1: very toxic role. It needs to be. It needs to
Speaker 1: be able to politically absorb a bunch of failure. If
Speaker 1: you spend all this money and you don't get any
Speaker 1: big failures, right, you spend all this money and you
Speaker 1: do all this backing up of things, and you bet
Speaker 1: on all these technologies, and there's nothing we can say
Speaker 1: at the end of it, hey, like that really didn't
Speaker 1: work out, Like you really picked wrong there. Then we
Speaker 1: have way, way, way aired on the side of making
Speaker 1: overly safe bets. You really want a bunch of things
Speaker 1: where if one of the fifteen pan out, it's transformative,
Speaker 1: as opposed to fifteen things were fourteen of the fifteen
Speaker 1: obviously pan out, and as such, the market could have
Speaker 1: done it just fine. The market has never, as far
Speaker 1: as I know, funded a shrimp running on treadmill startup,
Speaker 1: which is an obvious market failure and clear reason why
Speaker 1: we did the public sector. I believe, I'm not I
Speaker 1: believe I'm pulling that from something real. There are all
Speaker 1: these things there are There are all these um uh
Speaker 1: congressmen who give awards for dumbest no like there used
Speaker 1: to be like the cow farts one, but all this stuff. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, I here's a question, and I don't you
Speaker 1: know uh where I feel like you're probably uniquely positioned
Speaker 1: to answer um for us, which is within the Democratic Party.
Speaker 1: You know, there is there was a lot of reservation,
Speaker 1: particularly on the left, I think, towards chips, even though
Speaker 1: it's about public investment, the idea like private companies theoretically
Speaker 1: are going to benefit a lot from it. You know,
Speaker 1: you were like, are they going to use this money
Speaker 1: for stock buy backs? Etcetera? And so like within the
Speaker 1: Democratic Party right now, it's not like everyone has suddenly
Speaker 1: become supply siders, and that sort of old school do
Speaker 1: it on the demand side is pretty strong. How would
Speaker 1: you rate you know where the center of the Party.
Speaker 1: I don't mean centers and centrist although maybe implicitly it is,
Speaker 1: but the center of gravity within the Democratic Party, which
Speaker 1: you're much more plugged into than we are in terms
Speaker 1: of like taking on this supply side framing two problems.
Speaker 1: I have found on a bunch of these issues that
Speaker 1: there is more interest and less resistance than I expected,
Speaker 1: but also, in a funny way, less eventual pickup. So
Speaker 1: I thought a lot of this stuff would cause, frankly,
Speaker 1: a lot more blowback. Like I've been very critical of
Speaker 1: things like the National Environmental Policy Act, to the California
Speaker 1: Environmental Quality Act, think the Clean Air Act to some degree,
Speaker 1: things that are very central parts of the environmental movement
Speaker 1: legacy in this country operating today that are now being
Speaker 1: wielded against clean energy, or like my favorite example in Minnesota,
Speaker 1: they banned Minnesota. Minneapolis banned um single family zoning and
Speaker 1: there that policy got an injunction based on environmental review,
Speaker 1: like they they can't move forward on their band of
Speaker 1: single families owning because it didn't go through enough environmental view,
Speaker 1: like it's just crazy making. People have been more receptive
Speaker 1: to that, though not that interested in doing anything about it.
Speaker 1: I think of This is more of a problem of
Speaker 1: attention and what gets people into liberalism, um, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of liberal or democratic politics and to something even
Speaker 1: how the uh the machinery of government is set up,
Speaker 1: and I think of it is really a very tough
Speaker 1: ideological fight. So this is something I'm sure you guys
Speaker 1: ran into, but I was really struck over the last
Speaker 1: you know, it's called eighteen months as inflation got worse
Speaker 1: and worse and worse, talking to members of the Biden
Speaker 1: administration and just really realizing how much they were having
Speaker 1: to try to retool themselves bureaucratically, institutionally to just understand
Speaker 1: the productive side of the economy. Where you weren't trying
Speaker 1: to do efforts of macroeconomic stabilization, Um, you weren't just
Speaker 1: trying to kind of ask what are the big trends,
Speaker 1: but you're actually having to kind of figure out the ports.
Speaker 1: And the people who got charged with figure out the
Speaker 1: ports like that had not been their job. There was
Speaker 1: no person who that was their job, and like they
Speaker 1: had that information streaming in in a very usable way,
Speaker 1: and like they had a bureaucracy well set up to
Speaker 1: do something with it. So to some degree there is
Speaker 1: simply a mismatch, I think in the motivations and structures
Speaker 1: of the Democratic Party and also for that matter, of
Speaker 1: the Republican Party, and some of these problems in health care,
Speaker 1: for instance, which I know very very well. The amount
Speaker 1: of organizations, groups, non profits, people um talent that has
Speaker 1: gone in for decades to the question of how do
Speaker 1: we get more people health insurance is really really traumatic.
Speaker 1: The amount of people who got into that to go
Speaker 1: to war with the American Medical Association over how many
Speaker 1: doctors we are credit every year and what kinds of
Speaker 1: regulations we have on other qualified practitioners like nurse practitioners,
Speaker 1: so we could expand primary care um such that prices
Speaker 1: would fall on that UM. Nobody's in it for that
Speaker 1: right there in it to get health insurance to poor people,
Speaker 1: not to fight with doctors who are actually their friends
Speaker 1: on a bunch of these issues. And so it's more
Speaker 1: about that if you say this and not exactly against it,
Speaker 1: I mean the fact that we have capped the number
Speaker 1: of residency slots, and there was actually this big fight
Speaker 1: from the a M A years ago and others to
Speaker 1: convince politicians, and we had a problem with doctor over
Speaker 1: supply and now we have a problem with particularly primary
Speaker 1: care under supply. It's not people disagree with you, it's just,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like a company trying to do something
Speaker 1: that wasn't set up to do it, doesn't really know
Speaker 1: how to do it the right. People aren't that interested
Speaker 1: in it. It's coalition splitting work as opposed to coalition
Speaker 1: uniting work. So the problem isn't so much like the
Speaker 1: counter argument. The problem is almost like the argument has
Speaker 1: nowhere to go, like it's not well structured in the
Speaker 1: congressional committees. Um. So I've actually found that to be
Speaker 1: to be more of the difficulty here. So I realized
Speaker 1: we've been very focused on US policy for obvious reasons.
Speaker 1: But the problem of under investment is not exclusive to America.
Speaker 1: And in fact, you know, one thing we've learned over
Speaker 1: the summer is that it very much applies to places
Speaker 1: like Europe. Um, with their energy supply and energy policies
Speaker 1: and things like that. What accounts for that under investment
Speaker 1: in Europe? Like, what is the condition that is I
Speaker 1: guess common to both the US and places like Europe
Speaker 1: when it comes to under investment, Because when you look
Speaker 1: at Europe, you can't just say Oh, it's you know,
Speaker 1: Democrats and Republicans fighting and they can't agree on anything,
Speaker 1: or you know, we can't agree on how to fund
Speaker 1: it and things like that. Europe already has a slightly
Speaker 1: different approach when it comes to that, and yet they
Speaker 1: also seem to have struggled over the past decades. I
Speaker 1: don't know how to think about the question of under
Speaker 1: investment as both a sort of macro and international phenomenon,
Speaker 1: and I mean that in the sense of I'm not
Speaker 1: sure how useful I think under investment is as a concept.
Speaker 1: So some countries in Europe have done a lot more
Speaker 1: to invest in green energy than we have. Some countries
Speaker 1: in Europe invested a lot in nuclear energy, you know,
Speaker 1: like France over time, you know, and some have been, obviously,
Speaker 1: like Germany, going in the opposite direction. So one thing
Speaker 1: is I think it is worth looking at the sort
Speaker 1: of differences that are exploitable there. Something has been very,
Speaker 1: very helpful when thinking about infrastructure build is that, you know,
Speaker 1: lots of countries in Europe do rail train bridges, etcetera.
Speaker 1: We can actually look at proclometer costs and it's not perfect,
Speaker 1: but but there are people have been doing this like
Speaker 1: Alan Levy, and you can really see unbelievably large differences
Speaker 1: and how much things cost. But within that, I do
Speaker 1: think there's probably a consistent issue of simply rich society
Speaker 1: is becoming affluent enough that things are broadly good enough
Speaker 1: that what people want is not actually all that much change,
Speaker 1: and a lot of say infrastructure build is a among
Speaker 1: other things, a lot of disruption. I mean, it's all
Speaker 1: great to talk about infrastructure in your head, and then
Speaker 1: they're ripping up all the streets near my house and
Speaker 1: it's an unbelievable pain in the ass, right, Like, nobody
Speaker 1: actually likes it when infrastructure is being built near them. Um.
Speaker 1: And similarly, you know, I go back and forth on
Speaker 1: this old book by an economist named Manser Olson. I
Speaker 1: think it's called The Rise and Fall Nations or The
Speaker 1: Rise and Decline of Nations, and I think it's published
Speaker 1: in the seventies, if I'm not wrong, and it's a
Speaker 1: classic in public choice economics. But it you know, he's
Speaker 1: basically trying to explain why are Japan and Germany, which
Speaker 1: were bombed out during World War Two, growing so much
Speaker 1: quicker than the UK, UM and some other countries. And
Speaker 1: he comes to this argument that is wrong in a
Speaker 1: bunch of its particulars now that we have a longer
Speaker 1: time series on it, but it's clearly right in its
Speaker 1: general thrust that stable, affluent societies build up these very
Speaker 1: very thick networks of interest groups that are trying to
Speaker 1: get their bit of pie. I think misses that they
Speaker 1: also get a lot of actor networks that they're not
Speaker 1: just trying to redistribute money to themselves, but also just
Speaker 1: are trying to get their values instituted in society, even
Speaker 1: when that would be bad for their bottom line. But
Speaker 1: we have a lot of that um, you know, where
Speaker 1: people are trying to fight for the way they want
Speaker 1: a community to be as opposed to what they're housing.
Speaker 1: You know, values could actually be UM. He talks about
Speaker 1: complex agreements. As countries become, you know, again more affluent,
Speaker 1: more stable, they begin to become very you need a
Speaker 1: lot of complex negotiations between different players who, due to
Speaker 1: their longevity, due to their power, due to sort of
Speaker 1: move towards more small d democratic processes, have a real
Speaker 1: hold in the system, and so being able to negotiate
Speaker 1: these increasingly complex um negotiations becomes a core thing that
Speaker 1: ther rewarding people for and a lot of your talent
Speaker 1: goes into those areas as opposed to say engineering. I
Speaker 1: think it's Patrick Collison of Stripe who has made the
Speaker 1: point that if you're really into high speed rail in America,
Speaker 1: you're just not going to be very productive because it
Speaker 1: is in a lot of hi speed rail being built,
Speaker 1: and even though they are still working on things like
Speaker 1: the California High speed Rail initiative, uh, it's really really slow,
Speaker 1: it's really expensive. Like we've made a lot of engineers
Speaker 1: here unproductive, and it's a big pain to be an
Speaker 1: engineer working on these things. I'm just flooded now with
Speaker 1: people working on domestic infrastructure projects who want to tell
Speaker 1: me about how miserable their lives are where It's like
Speaker 1: working on crypto up until a couple of months ago
Speaker 1: was super fun because nobody told you know, and I
Speaker 1: would just shoveled money on you. So I do think something.
Speaker 1: It's probably consistent, you know, whatever the I think. The
Speaker 1: reason I'm a little skeptical under investments sometimes is that
Speaker 1: there's what our investment could be getting us at its
Speaker 1: current levels, and what it is getting us. But nevertheless,
Speaker 1: like there is clearly a these societies are all turning
Speaker 1: dials in a billion different ways against building, against risk,
Speaker 1: and it just becomes sludgy. And then you know, you're
Speaker 1: a young person thinking about where to go and like
Speaker 1: where to make your mark, and it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: you go into these mediator industries, like you know at
Speaker 1: law and management consulting and finance as opposed to the
Speaker 1: actual building stuff industries, and that stuff you know, cycle off,
Speaker 1: the cycle, you know, begins to have a real effect.
Speaker 1: I think this is the second episode of Late where
Speaker 1: the conclusion is we had to kill this crypto thing
Speaker 1: so people can work on something productive as a client.
Speaker 1: It was so great to have you on. We're out
Speaker 1: of time, but we could actually go for a long time,
Speaker 1: and as all the good conversations, all our best conversations,
Speaker 1: give me like five ideas for episodes including you know,
Speaker 1: we got to talk more about environmental review and we
Speaker 1: got to talk about old environmentalism versus new environmentalism and
Speaker 1: all this stuff. So great to have you on the show.
Speaker 1: Really appreciate you coming on out lots, Thank you. I
Speaker 1: love being here. So should we do spin off the
Speaker 1: Bottleneck Detectives? That would be a fun show. Like a
Speaker 1: TV show. That would be a great name for a
Speaker 1: TV series or even a podcast. So yes, yes we
Speaker 1: should have like some like haunted, you know, sort of
Speaker 1: like mysterious music, like the Scooby Doo. We're wandering around
Speaker 1: with like big magnifying glasses looking for supply side constraints. Okay,
Speaker 1: on a serious note, there was a lot that I
Speaker 1: found interesting in that conversation. But I did think Ezra's
Speaker 1: point about the government being willing to finance and support
Speaker 1: failures and politically failure, yeah, I thought that was really interesting.
Speaker 1: And also, can I just say that that shrimp treadmill
Speaker 1: study is a real thing, and there is a video
Speaker 1: of the shrimp running on the treadmill, and I have
Speaker 1: to say they move kind of like I do on
Speaker 1: a treadmill, which is which is to say, reluctantly, extremely reluctantly.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that does plice in some of the video
Speaker 1: for the video version of this episode. You Know, something
Speaker 1: I was thinking that I thought was very powerful is
Speaker 1: like this idea of there's a lot of openness to
Speaker 1: some of these supply side ideas, but whether that openness
Speaker 1: actually turns turns into action is a very separate question,
Speaker 1: and you know, just recording this August yesterday we had
Speaker 1: the New York primaries and one of the candidates in
Speaker 1: New York twelve and maybe he never had a shot
Speaker 1: of winning anyway, but one of the candidates, uh in
Speaker 1: New York call made a point about like repealing the
Speaker 1: foreigne Rege Act of clearly an odd lots fan um
Speaker 1: sarage pateel Uh. Maybe we should have on at some
Speaker 1: point and talk about that. But it was interesting because
Speaker 1: it's like that's not a big vote mover, you know.
Speaker 1: And granted he didn't make that like the centerpiece of
Speaker 1: his campaign, but it does seem to you know, get more,
Speaker 1: take take home more of your money, tax cuts, etcetera.
Speaker 1: The language exists, to Ezra is in initial point the
Speaker 1: language of these sort of like taxes or vouchers that exists.
Speaker 1: What is the political language of talking about dredge capacity? Right?
Speaker 1: I think that's a really important point, which is that
Speaker 1: you know, as are mentioned that info gathering idea that
Speaker 1: all these politicians in d C have had to suddenly
Speaker 1: get up to speed on things like the ports over
Speaker 1: the last couple of years. But then it's also the
Speaker 1: voting population, right, like all of these people are suddenly
Speaker 1: going to have to form opinions on things like the
Speaker 1: Foreign Drudge Act and how do we actually do the
Speaker 1: voters are not it seems unless they listen, it seems tough.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, you know, if the pitches
Speaker 1: this is something that can help the economy and push
Speaker 1: down prices, then maybe that's a simplistic way into it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a lot there. Okay, are we going to leave it there?
Speaker 1: Let's leave it there. Okay. This has been another episode
Speaker 1: of the All Thoughts podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can
Speaker 1: follow me on Twitter at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe
Speaker 1: Isn't All. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart.
Speaker 1: Follow our guest As Recline on Twitter at as Reclined,
Speaker 1: follow our producer Kerman Rodriguez at Carmen Armand, and check
Speaker 1: out all of the podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle
Speaker 1: at podcasts. Thanks for listening.