let's talk about how bullish you are for by comparison
for america in particular i guess north america in general why is our condition
so much different in a deglobalizing world than the chinese or really
more or less anywhere else on the map well let's start with the basis uh we never globalized our
economy to the degree of everyone else it was a bribe and if we had included our economy in
the bribe it wouldn't have been a bribe and we wouldn't have had as many takers
so to a degree the degradation of american manufacturing is in part not a bug but a
feature we specifically opened up our market and did not necessarily demand reciprocal attention
that's part of why the populists are doing so well now because you carry that on for 50 years and it
starts to change a few things from a demographic point of view because we had more time and because
we had more space we had different structure so you put those two things together our system
was never invested into the global norm and our population structure is fundamentally different
on top of that you can play things like the fact that we more or less have a continent to ourselves
you can play on top of that the fact that mexico was one of the last developing countries to really
try to industrialize they didn't start till after china so they have a much younger demographic and
partnered with us in nafta it's perfect you can add in that canada despite having a horrible
and to use a very loaded term native-born population is aging faster than the europeans
is the most pro-immigration country ever and has managed to continually fill out its 20-somethings
with imports and then of course you've got south america which a little bit like mexico
did not industrialize nearly as early and has at least another 40 years compared to much of
the rest of the world and we're all in the same hemisphere together now i will never never bet
that the american government at all levels will take steps to make it worse but the headwinds
in trying to damage this are immense we haven't had great government here for a very long time
and yet we still have the strongest economy we still have the largest financial sector
we're still the world's largest producer of oil and foodstuffs and because of nafta we are party
to the most forward capable manufacturing block in the world these are all good things one of
the advantages of being a pioneer state and having generations of people who push into the interior
and do well for themselves is americans do not react well to shocks and failures because we're
convinced that everything can should will is ordained by god to get better every single year
and so when it doesn't as the rest of the world knows that it happens all the time
we tend to lose our minds and we overreact and we have seen this in most of our foreign
policy crises whether it's 911 or vietnam or sputnik it generates a regenerating phase in
american politics and economics where we react to what we think is the dying of the light and
we overcompensate and we push too far and in doing so we redefine ourselves and we redefine the world
i don't think when a situation like that is going to trigger in the next 10 or 15 years i think
we have to wait for the dust to kind of settle on the deglobalized world and wait for someone
else to rise up and spook us no god forbid who that is but i think that is kind of a hard stop
that it will guarantee some sort of regeneration the united states in a new form whether looking
back or looking forward to that it's a direction that we feel we should go that's an open question
but we do this from time to time about once a generation second the way our electoral system
is set up is almost designed to generate moments like what we're in right now
when you have a first pass the post system and you have to get one more vote than the other guy
it encourages you to have a relatively big tent party and when you have that not everyone's going
to be on the same page you have different factions and those factions are going to move around under
that big tent jockeying for power over who gets to be the primary candidate to go on to the general
election uh and who gets to call the shots as to what the litmus test issues that determine
who is a democrat and who is a republican every generation or two we have changes in geopolitics
and demographics and technology culture and the factions move and if you look at the last three
years we've had the height of globalization i would argue we're now in deglobalization
we've had the height of the baby boomers we now have the retirement of the baby boomers
we had the end of the cold war we had the rise of china to think that we're going to manage our
politics in the same way despite all those changes i think is a little neurotic and so the factions
are moving again and they're getting very loud not just because of social media but because
everybody wants their issue to be the one that determines whether you're republican or democrat
trump came in and unceremoniously ejected several factions from the republican coalition
i would argue that national security and fiscal voters and business voters for the most part
have become swing voters now but he also managed to attract a lot of hispanics
and the bulk of the union movement and we now have a tug and war going back and forth between trump's
republicans and bidenos democrats over where organized labor is ultimately going to shake out
the last time we did this it was the 1930s we had the great depression we had world war ii
back then african americans were almost 2a person republicans and big business were almost
to a business democrats we will get through this but it usually takes 10 to 15 years and we're only
in year six right now we unfortunately have a ways to go now whether or not you like the shape of the
parties on the backside you know i doubt they're gonna it's gonna be a compromise no one's gonna be
entirely happy with it but we'll get through this and the parties will look different maybe we'll
have a third one we've done that three times in the past but this is this is part of the evolution
of the american political system and before you think that i am just washing this as all away as
something that we shouldn't worry about on one of these seven transitions we did have the civil war
there is a risk here what about the risk of the consequences of deglobalization
just being well comparatively benign for america still fairly terrible i mean i just you know
it occurs to me that there are several global problems that only a coordinated global response
could address and you know climate change is certainly one of them what what do you see as the
the further implications of a proper american retreat from the world stage the primary
negative implication for the united states in the short term and by short i mean 10 years or less
is in manufacturing we basically need to double the size of our industrial plant to be able to
build the stuff that we've become accustomed to and we have to do that in an environment where we
have a shortage of workers for at least the next 10 years and probably a capital shortage as well
there is no way that we do that without a significantly inflationary environment
but doubling the size of your industrial plant is massively growth generating so
we are capable of having high growth and high inflation for several years at the same time
when we're completing the low fly at this time passing zero seven zero four one
four zero rtb linking via septum
you