Tyler Cowen: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think the first thing I want to say is that we can definitely understand China right now as being partially 1950s America. What do I associate with 1950s America? A bunch of things, including a giant highway building spree under Eisenhower, and that is what the Chinese have done. There are these traditionalist attitudes toward work and gender, which the Communist Party is enforcing, minimal immigration attitude of favorability between both of these time zones, between both of these places. I think that one can definitely understand China as an earlier America. I also understand China as perhaps an even earlier America, the start of the 20th century, in which the US wasn’t doing terrific amounts of groundbreaking science that was mostly left to the Germans and the other Europeans. There was just a lot of hucksterism going on, and there was just a sense of vibrancy and a can-do attitude which has partially dissipated now in China, but has been defining China, I think, for the last few decades. I think that my hypothesis is that China will continue to build much, much more because it doesn’t have a lot of these American notions of being super obsessed with financial measures, like profitability, as well as these other ratios. I think there is something much more common in China, as well as the rest of East Asia, where the business leaders are much more concerned about simply market share than they are about having really high profits. I think that is an element of China in which they are going to be investing a lot more because they’re not targeting exactly the same things as American business leaders. I understand the Communist Party to be possibly the most technology-obsessed large institution in the world. I think that every country in the world would declare that it would like to have a lot of high technology. We can have Canada saying that, we can have Austria saying that, but I think the Chinese really, really mean it because over the last two centuries, they’ve understood part of their self-described humiliations as not possessing technology, when the European imperialists, as well as the Japanese fascists, made incursions into China because they did have technology. I think they are going to continue investing in all of these different things. I think there’s just so much competition among the industrial companies in China, as well as so much bureaucratic incentive among the state-owned enterprises and the civil engineers who are always planning a next big subway station, a next big high-speed rail link, that they will continue to invest in all of these things. This is where I think the engineering mindset is a little bit more part of the process. This critique that the United States is too financialized or too concerned with the bottom line, hasn’t recent experience with AI infrastructure and data centers shown we can rise to the occasion? It’s not obvious all of that will make money, but we’re going to put up trillions of dollars to do it. We’re going to do it pretty rapidly. We’re way ahead of China, certainly ahead of the rest of the world. The Gulf may end up in the running there. The US is acting very quickly. We’re clearing away a lot of obstacles. Trump administration wants to make review much quicker. Probably, they’ll do at least part of that. We’re just way ahead of China in the area, and that’s the most important thing. Why think the Chinese are doing it well? They’re obsessed with technology, but because they don’t have the private sector involved enough, they make the wrong picks. First, I agree that the US has been doing amazingly well in terms of data construction buildout in particular. I think we can debate the premise of whether AI is going to be the sharp tip of the spear to be almost essentially the final technology, in which we don’t need much more technology after this one.…

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