The ROAD (Renewing Opportunity in the American Dream) to Housing Act is a bipartisan bill now making its way through Congress. 

And as today’s guest, Alex Armlovich, and his colleagues at the Niskanen Center argue, it is “the first comprehensive bid to tackle the roots of America’s‬ affordability crisis in a generation—it correctly‬‭ identifies, and takes initial steps to attack,‬ the interlocking barriers to housing abundance at every level.” 

Not only that, but the bill is “miraculously‬ bipartisan, and its negotiation and development exhibited a stunning, almost‬ anachronistic return to the old Senate tradition of depolarized collegiality and bipartisan‬ problem-solving.‬”

But before discussing the contents of the bill, Alex and Cardiff first talk about recent shifts in housing-policy alliances, the roots of the housing affordability and availability problem, housing experiments that have worked (and haven’t), the roll of the “Abundance” movement, and the genuine collective-action problems that housing advocates too often ignore. 

Then they break down the ROAD to Housing Act into three main buckets, going into detail on each: 1) Regulatory reform, 2) carrots and sticks, and 3) financing and funding. They also comment on what the bill would fix and what it wouldn’t, and its chances of becoming law. 

Finally, Alex and Cardiff reflect on housing, construction, and the nature of physical change in New York City, where both have spent the bulk of their adult lives. 

Related links: 

• Alex Armlovich about page (at Niskanen Center)
• Niskanen Center home page (where the upcoming ROAD to Housing Act analysis from Alex and his colleagues will appear)

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Rob Armstrong is the writer who first coined the acronym in The TACO Trade, which stands for Trump Always Chickens Out, in a column back in April. He wasn’t trying to go viral, much less have the acronym circulate throughout Wall Street and the media, much less have President Trump be asked about it. But that’s what happened. 

Armstrong is the Unhedged columnist and podcaster at the Financial Times. He also had a prior career at a hedge fund, which abruptly ended in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. He also has a PhD in philosophy, making him an unusual figure in the world of finance and economics journalism. The topics he writes about reflect this varied background. 

He and Cardiff reflect on the strangeness of coining a term that has such reverberations in a prominent national conversation, in this case the one surrounding President Trump’s tariff strategy, and whether the trade itself still applies. They also discuss how the feedback loops created by the acronym represent the fundamental nature of markets and the ways that societal narratives get around these days. 

But the main part of their chat is about US markets at the moment. Are they in a bubble? Why has there not been more of a negative effect from tariffs? And why has the US dollar fallen — and stayed fallen — while US stocks have returned to all-time highs just this week? What should we make of the horrific returns on long-term Treasuries this decade? And are higher interest rates truly here to stay? 

They also discuss Rob’s switch from working in finance to writing about it, and his recent column on Rene Girard and the mimetic rivalries that seem to define this political moment. Finally, they close with a surprising topic that Rob frequently also writes and speaks about: men’s fashion. 

Related links: 

• The Unhedged Newsletter (Rob Armstrong)
• Unhedged Podcast (Katie Martin with Rob)
• A Wealth of Common Sense (Ben Carlson)
• The Overshoot (Matt Klein)
• Feed Me (Emily Sundberg)
• Rob’s Life & Arts column
• Rob’s FT style column

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Will artificial intelligence help you do your job, or will it just straight-up do your job and leave you unemployable? 

Or will the future bring something else entirely — either between those two extremes or a world that we simply cannot imagine yet? And are we already starting to see signs of that future emerging? 

On this episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff is joined by economist Nathan Goldschlag, Research Director at the Economic Innovation Group. Until recently, Nathan was Principal Economist at the U.S. Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, where among other things he led research on the impact of technology, including AI, on the economy. Any worthwhile list of the world’s best economists on the subject of AI and work would have to include him. 

Cardiff and Nathan go through Nathan’s own research* and also filter out the megaton of nonsense on the topic and discuss some of the work done by others — research, essays, meanderings — that they think is actually worth sharing with listeners. 

They discuss, among other things: 

• How many businesses are now using AI to produce goods and services
• How have things changed since the launch and popularization of large language models
• Economic growth consequences of AI
• Whether “learn to code” is still good advice 
• The skills that still matter 
• To steer or not to steer the AI future

* Nathan’s research on AI was done in collaboration with a large team of researchers at the Center for Economic Studies at the U.S. Census Bureau including Emin Dinlersoz, Lucia Foster, David Beede, John Haltiwanger, Zach Kroff, Nikolas Zolas, Gary Anderson, and Eric Childress, along with program area partners including Kathryn Bonney, Cory Breaux, Cathy Buffington, and Keith Savage, as well as academic partners including Daron Acemoglu, Erik Brynjolfsson, Kristina McElheran, and Pascual Restrepo. 

Related links:

• The impact of AI on the workforce: Tasks versus jobs?
• Tracking Firm Use of AI in Real Time: A Snapshot from the Business Trends and Outlook Survey.
• The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI | NBER
• Answering the Call of Automation
• AI-2027.com
• Tyler Cowen - the #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humans
• Driverless trucks are coming and unions aren’t happy about it
• Generative AI at Work

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It's hard to think of a better guide to the ongoing US-China trade war than Evan Medeiros. A professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and a lifelong scholar of the US-China relationship, Evan is also the co-author (with James Polk) of a new study, China's New Economic Weapons. Ever since the trade wars of the first Trump term, Chinese officials have been designing a new set of weapons to prepare them for another provocation from the US.

"Whereas in the past China mainly used basic trade or investment incentives and sanctions," the authors write, "today China is developing, testing, and deploying an entirely new collection of legal and regulatory tools for the explicit purpose of imposing targeted costs on companies and countries it sees as acting against its interests. In effect, these are precision-guided economic munitions, designed to inflict targeted and often substantial pain for political and geopolitical purposes." 

In other words, China has been preparing for exactly this moment. 

Cardiff and Evan discuss these new weapons, the long evolution of the US-China relationship, Evan's own experience in policymaking in the Obama White House, how both American and Chinese leaders have changed in the past decade, and the stakes of the current standoff.

Related links: 

• China's New Economic Weapons
• China and Russia Will Not Be Split
• The Delusion of Peak China
• Evan's Faculty Page

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Chad Bown is not just among the world’s most respected trade economists. He is also perhaps the single most careful tracker of real-time trade activity — which obviously makes him the best possible guest to explain the consequences of US President Donald Trump’s decision on April 2nd to impose new tariffs on China and many other countries in addition to further escalating the trade war with China just a week later while changing course (though not entirely) against the rest of the world.

Among the topics they chatted about: 

• The scale of the potential fallout 
• Where the tariffs stand now — including earlier tariffs already imposed
• The ongoing threat to the American auto industry 
• What it all means for the global liberal trading order 
• The worst-case and best-case scenarios 

…and more! 

Related links: 

• Chad Bown home page
• Trade Talks, Chad’s podcast 
• Chad’s (updated in real time) interview with Kai Ryssdal
• The trade war timeline

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Joining Cardiff for this episode is Jared Bernstein, who was most recently the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors for President Joe Biden following a long career in economic policy and public service. 

Jared shares with Cardiff his thoughts on the current economic moment, the achievements he was most proud of during the Biden years, and a few regrets. They also discuss: 

• How the econ policymaking sausage gets made
• Trade policy, globalization with allies, and concerns about protectionism
• Inflation challenges, including the impact of the American Rescue Plan
• Unions and worker bargaining power
• The housing supply crisis and the role of federal incentives for local reforms
• Immigration
• AI’s possible effects on labor and productivity 
• How an early musical career led Jared to economics

RELATED LINKS

• Jared’s Substack newsletter
• Jason Furman’s Foreign Affairs article
• Jared’s response to Furman
• 2024 Economic Report of the President
• EIG’s analysis on “Manufacturing jobs boom not reaching places hit by the China Shock”

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On today’s episode, Cardiff chats with his EIG colleagues Adam Ozimek, chief economist, and Connor O’Brien, research analyst, about the one policy that achieves all three of the following goals simultaneously: 

1. It massively boosts the rate of economic growth through its effects on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the creation of entire new industries.

1. It reduces inequality.

1. Not only does it cost the taxpayers nothing, it actually saves them huge sums of money. 

That policy is the expansion of high-skilled immigration, a subject that became a source of contentious debate within the American right not long after the 2024 election. As it happens, Adam and Connor are the co-authors (with John Lettieri) of a big new report, Exceptional by Design, which explains how to design a high-skilled immigration that will maximize its benefits for American workers, businesses, and communities. 

In this chat, the three discuss: 

• How bad thinking has led to bad policy 
• The surprisingly nuanced economics of high-skilled immigration
• Three myths about high-skilled immigration
• The flaws in the current system 
• A new policy vision to change it

The three close with a discussion of why high-skilled immigration carries so much promise for the United States in particular — and the enormous, self-inflicted damage of failing to capitalize on it.

RELATED LINK

• Exceptional by Design, by Adam Ozimek, Connor O’Brien, and John Lettieri 

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It’s not often that someone comes up with a new, provocative, and persuasive theory about the competition between the US and China to be the world’s leading economic and technological superpower. The topic is so salient right now, the source of so much commentary, that it’s hard to say something that hasn’t already been said many, many times. 

But this episode’s guest, Jeffrey Ding — a scholar of international relations at the George Washington University and the author of a new book called Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition — has done just that.

And the short version of Ding’s theory goes like this… 

It’s not as important as you might think for a country to be the first one to develop the new technologies of the future. What really matters are two things. 

First, that the technologies a country does develop are General Purpose Technologies. These are technologies that make every sector across the economy more productive, more efficient, more innovative. The personal computer and other information technologies, for example, didn’t just make the tech sector more productive. Workers in every industry use computers to be better at their jobs. 

And the second thing that matters is that a country be especially good at diffusing, or spreading, those General Purpose Technologies throughout the whole economy, precisely so that those technologies can make everyone more productive. 

And as Jeff argues, the US already has big advantages over China on both of these indicators. But why? What makes a country better at technological diffusion? What are the leading contenders for the general purpose technologies of the future? And what policies can a country put in place if it wants to become or remain the world’s dominant economic superpower?   

You’ll find answers to those questions and more in this episode’s chat with Jeffrey Ding. 

RELATED LINKS:

• Jeffrey’s GitHub page
• Technology and the Rise of Great Powers (Jeffrey’s book) 
• ChinAI (Jeffrey’s newsletter about Chinese AI) 
• The Illusion of China’s AI Progress (Foreign Affairs essay)

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How close is the 2024 presidential election? 

Here is how the New York Times framed it recently: “Never in modern presidential campaigns have so many states been so tight this close to Election Day. Polling averages show that all seven battleground states are within the margin of error, meaning the difference between a half-point up and a half-point down — essentially a rounding error — could win or lose the White House.” 

A recent Times-Sienna poll has the race between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris deadlocked at 48 to 48. Other polls are similarly close — which does not mean they are all telling the same story. Today’s guest, Kristen Soltis Anderson, writes that although “several of them show a dead heat, beneath the surface, they diverge in how they arrive at that result”. 

What stories can we glean from each poll? What theories of this election can we derive from those stories? Are the polls even right? And why, despite verbal gaffes and incendiary rallies and international conflict and general campaign turmoil, have the polling averages remained so steady in recent months? 

Kristen is a founding partner of Echelon Insights, an opinion research and analytics firm, and contributing Opinion writer to the New York Times, where she often writes about what is knowable and not knowable based on the polls. We talk about all these themes, including a theory of the election that Kristen came upon while watching football in Phoenix on a Sunday.

Finally, we discuss a detailed survey of American workers that Echelon Insights, Kristen’s firm, put into the field for the Economic Innovation Group — and its most surprising findings. 

All this and more on today’s episode!

RELATED LINKS: 

Opinion | The Polls Show a Dead Heat, but They Don’t All Tell the Same Story

Opinion | Two Weeks to Go, but Only One Way to Stay Calm

Opinion | This Year’s October Surprise May Be That There Isn’t One

Opinion | Why the Election Is Coming Down to Defining Kamala Harris - The New York Times

Opinion | I’ve Studied the Polls. Here’s Why Harris Isn’t Running Away With It.

The American Worker Project Survey: Key Findings Deck

American workers and the 2024 election

Kristen’s website

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What is the right foreign economic policy toward China? Did the Fed cut rates in time to avoid a recession? Have agglomeration economies been changed by work-from-home and the dematerializing economy? 

On September 21st, Paul Krugman joined host Cardiff Garcia live on stage for a sweeping conversation at the #EconTwitterIRL conference in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. 

They discussed not only Paul’s view of the economy and his achievements in economics, but also his approach to communicating his ideas about economics — which is likely to be as important a part of Paul’s legacy as the (Nobel prize winning) economics itself.

Among the other topics they covered: 

• Paul’s hippie-punching days in the 1990s 
• How economic geography has changed through the decades
• Whether place-based policy works
• Why a previous regret no longer bothers him much
• How Paul blends style and substance in his writing 
• Why Democrats seem so bad at running big cities 
• The work Paul is most proud of

And at the end of this fun, dense, and surprisingly humorous chat, you’ll hear Paul answer the questions he fielded from the audience of economists, journalists, think tankers and others in attendance. 

RELATED LINKS: 

• Incidents from my Career

• How I Work

• What isn’t the matter with American Workers

• TPP at the NABE

• How Trump Is Undermining the Economy in Some Struggling Cities

• Geography and Trade

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