July 31, 2025

Making Sense of Milei, AI & Employment, and America's Future

54 minutes

In this episode, Noah Smith and Erik Torenberg explore Argentina's economic reforms under President Milei, development models in emerging economies like Vietnam and Malaysia, effective crime reduction strategies, and how AI might reshape our workforce and population dynamics in the coming decades.

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Argentina's Economic Reforms: President Milei's fiscal austerity measures to address chronic deficits without dollarization, focusing on necessary belt-tightening for a middle-income country supporting an upper-income welfare state

Development Models in Emerging Economies: Case studies like Vietnam and Bangladesh demonstrating different paths to economic development

The Crime Rate Decline: Focused deterrence approaches and community policing helping reduce violent crime, especially among high-risk populations

Education and Fertility Rates: The inverse relationship between women's education and fertility rates, and the impossibility of reversing it without dystopian measures

AI and Population Dynamics: How artificial intelligence might mitigate economic damage from population decline by replacing human labor

Quotes:

"If AI really can replace humans, then that will mitigate the economic damage from the losses of population." - Noah Smith

"Murders between people who know each other, between people who are like intimate partner violence has gone way down." - Noah Smith

"We need to basically create technologies that make it easy to take care of kids so that parenthood doesn't mean it's giant change in your life." - Noah Smith

LINKS:

Noahpinion newsletter: https://noahpinion.substack.com/

Erik Torenberg's Substack: https://eriktorenberg.substack.com/

Got questions for Noah and Erik to answer on air? Send them to [email protected]

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By Turpentine

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