The New Bazaar

Episodios

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  Sex, Drugs, and Death 24.07.2026 1h 8m

  Economist Alvin Roth, winner of the economics Nobel in 2012 for his work on market design, joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work.The book is about morally contested markets: transactions that participants would like to engage in but that others think they shouldn't be allowed to, even when it’s hard to identify measurable harms to those objectors. It's also a great way to understand how markets interact with the law, politics, social norms, income inequality, human psychology, and so much more than just monetary exchange.In this chat, Alvin and Cardiff discuss:Medical aid in dying and the economics of “repugnant” marketsSex work, trafficking, and the unintended consequences of criminalizationPlural marriage and the challenge of designing new legal protectionsSports gambling and the rise of prediction marketsKidney exchanges, the transplantation shortage, and the opposition to cross-border exchangesThroughout the conversation, they confront the trade-offs involved in both allowing controversial markets and trying to ban them.Related links:Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales: What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets WorkAlvin Roth’s website
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  Debt and Deficits: Time to Worry? 26.06.2026 1h 13m

  Martha Gimbel, executive director of The Budget Lab at Yale, returns to the New Bazaar to chat with Cardiff about all things debt and deficits.Martha argues that the fiscal choices of the past decade have already led to higher costs on mortgages, car loans, and small-business debt. She and Cardiff discuss what might happen next given the frightening projections for future borrowing.They discuss:Is “we can’t leave this problem to our kids and grandkids” a misleading way to think about the national debt?Why is it so hard to know exactly what level of debt could lead to a fiscal crisis? Why such precision is often the enemy of understandingDoes she take flak from the left for arguing that the crowding out effect is a real thing?Immigration and the deficitWhich policies could actually bend the deficit curve down?A DOGE post-mortemAnd lots more.Related links:Lower Immigration Means Lower Productivity Growth by Abhi Gupta2026 chart book examines spending, taxes, and deficits by Jessica RiedlMartha’s The Atlantic piece on the national debtThe National Debt’s Unforgiving Math by Jared BernsteinThe Budget Lab at Yale websiteThe Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036 | Congressional Budget OfficeWhere Do Our Federal Tax Dollars Go? | Center on Budget and Policy PrioritiesCRS report on Foreign Holdings of Federal Debt
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  AI Shock vs the China Shock 18.06.2026 56m

  The China Shock of the 1990s and 2000s remains, even now, the subject of much debate. American consumers benefited from the cheaper goods that were imported from China. Some American businesses also benefited from importing cheaper equipment that was made in China. But other American businesses suffered from the competition, shuttering factories throughout the Rest Belt and South. How bad was it? What was the overall effect on workers? How did workers and communities adjust? Today’s episode is about the lessons of that shock for what might end up being a brand new shock: the AI Shock. Economists and many others are trying to figure out what it’s going to mean if AI itself ends up becoming a new source of competition for American businesses and American workers. One such economist is Adam Ozimek, Chief Economist at the Economic Innovation Group. Adam is the co-author of a new analysis about the right and wrong lessons to take from the China shock for the strange world that we now find ourselves in. (You can find that post at agglomerations.eig.org, EIG’s newsletter.)Adam speaks with Cardiff about the similarities and differences between the workers and towns affected by the two shocks, which characteristics matter most for people and places to become resilient to large shocks, how to think about automation and the collection of tasks that make up a job, and much more. Related links: Agglomerations Messy Jobs, by Luis Garicano
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  A City From Scratch 05.06.2026 1h 4m

  This episode is about an ambitious project to erect an entire new city in California, from scratch, about a one-hour drive north of San Francisco.The company that wants to build this city is called California Forever. It has bought about 70,000 acres of land in Solano County, starting in 2017. That’s about the size of two San Franciscos or one-and-a-half Miamis.What California Forever wants the city to be is two things.First: an urbanist, walkable city of about 400,000-500,000 people; zoned for density instead of suburban sprawl, with housing to rent or buy that’s affordable to middle income families; cool amenities; and located in a place where you would not expect to find it.Second: a tech manufacturing center, with new factories making actual physical stuff, and a big shipbuilding operation. A place that creates new jobs and businesses and tax revenues for the people that move there and the surrounding communities.Any project like this is immensely complicated, having to figure out transportation, engineering and logistical problems, waste disposal, how to attract people and businesses to the city, navigate local politics and how city governance is gonna work.Above all, California Forever has to figure out how to build something new and urban in California — a state with lots of wonderful stuff but also a place that’s known for its NIMBY dynamics, high taxes, zoned for suburban sprawl and single-family homes, endless regulatory or environmental reviews, water issues, union negotiations.The country needs more experiments like this. And many states, not just California, need to discover, or rediscover, the virtues of making it easier to create new housing and businesses, build factories, attract people, and just do stuff generally. And even if this project doesn’t work out, at least the rest of us get to learn the valuable economic and social lessons of what works and what doesn’t.Although Cardiff is rooting for the project to succeed, he also has quite a few questions about it. And it just so happens that this episode’s guest is exactly the person who can answer those questions. Jan Sramek is the Founder and CEO of California Forever. He started the company with the backing of tech investors and founders including John and Patrick Collison, Laurene Powell, Marc Andreessen, Michael Moritz, and a few others.Related links: California Forever websiteCalifornia Forever project overview deckClear a path for sweeping urban experiments such as California Forever (LAT)A City Is Broke. Can Billionaires’ Urbanist Dream Offer It a Last Chance? (NYT)
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  Ideas for a Post-YIMBY Housing Future 25.03.2026 1h 9m

  Arpit Gupta, a finance professor at NYU who has made important contributions on a startingly high number of topics, speaks with Cardiff about his latest contributions to the study of housing affordability, remote work, artificial intelligence, and finance. Arpit is on board with the basic YIMBY project of undoing the oppressive zoning codes that limit housing construction in so many parts of the country, but he doesn’t think the housing story ends there. Other obstacles will remain even in the case of further YIMBY progress, and in the meantime he has offered a variety of reform ideas that both complement YIMBY ideas and also prepare for a future after a YIMBY victory. Among them are re-thinking property taxes, accelerating depreciation schedules, and making it easier for factory housing to get to market. Arpit and Cardiff end with a chat about the ways that AI can help us understand housing regulations, what AI means for the future of finance, and what he is both optimistic and pessimistic about. Related links: Remote Work's Impact on ProductivityWork from Home and the Office Real Estate ApocalypseOffice to Residential ConversionsUnlock a Housing Boom through Depreciation BonusesThree Rules for AI in FinanceIndustrial Policy for Housing Construction
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  The Roots of our Zero-Sum Moment 09.03.2026 56m

  Stefanie Stantcheva is an economist at Harvard and the head of the Social Economics Lab, where her team has done extraordinary work investigating how people form their opinions about economic and political topics. That work was the subject of an earlier New Bazaar episode. In this episode, Stefanie chats with Cardiff about the findings in her paper (with co-authors Sahil Chinoy, Nathan Nunn, and Sandra Sequeira), “Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences,” which was just published in the American Economic Review. From the paper’s abstract: “We find that a more zero-sum mindset is strongly associated with more support for government redistribution, race- and gender-based affirmative action, and more restrictive immigration policies. Zero-sum thinking can be traced back to the experiences of both the individual and their ancestors, encompassing factors such as the degree of intergenerational upward mobility they experienced, whether they immigrated to the United States or lived in a location with more immigrants, and whether they were enslaved or lived in a location with more enslavement.” Stefanie and Cardiff also discuss:Rising anger in American societyThe subtle ways that the two major political parties are similar and different when it comes to zero-sum thinkingThe economic geography of zero-sum thoughtThe finding that surprised her the mostThe generational gap in zero-sum thinking between young and oldThe policy implications of her researchFinally, Stefanie previews her upcoming work on zero-sum thinking and concerns about AI. Related links:“Zero-Sum Thinking and the Roots of US Political Differences”“To understand America today, study the zero-sum mindset” (Stefanie’s guest essay in The Economist)  “Emotions and Policy Views” (Stefanie’s working paper with Yann Algan, Eva Davoine, and Thomas Renault)“Dancing with the Stars” (Stefanie’s paper with Ufuk Akcigit, Santiago Caicedo, Ernest Miguelez, and Valerio Sterzi)
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  AI and the Human Touch 09.02.2026 44m

  EIG chief economist Adam Ozimek chats with Cardiff Garcia about Adam’s new post, AI and the Economics of the Human Touch. An excerpt: Either AI is so useless that we are in the middle of a bubble that’s about to burst and take the economy down with it, or AI is so powerful it’s going to replace us all and devastate the labor market.The pessimism in speculation about the economic effects of artificial intelligence is often so overwhelming that these opposing concerns can even come from the same person. AI is evolving fast enough that we should not entirely ignore the economic doomers, though it would be nice if they could at least be consistent.But it is essential to balance the discussion with some optimism. I can see glimmers of hope in a simple fact: There are many jobs and tasks that easily could have been automated by now — the technology to automate them has long existed — and yet we humans continue to do them. The reason is that demand will always exist for certain jobs that offer what I call “the human touch.”The specific jobs that require the human touch may themselves change or evolve, but I suspect that such jobs will continue to exist long into the future.Adam and Cardiff discuss the job that inspired Adam’s post, why the Olive Garden represents a hopeful future for work in an age of AI, the perils and promise of AI for caregiving jobs, and how Adam himself plans to prepare for the eventual automation of his daily tasks.Related links: Adam’s postAgglomerations homepage (subscribe!)
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  Crime, Leniency, and the Science of Second Chances 16.01.2026 1h 7m

  Jen Doleac is an economist and the director of the Criminal Justice program at Arnold Ventures. She joins Cardiff on the show to chat about her upcoming new book, “The Science of Second Chances: A Revolution in Criminal Justice”. From the book jacket: Freakonomics for criminal justice, The Science of Second Chances presents a groundbreaking approach to criminal justice reform, revealing how small-scale interventions can reduce people’s chances of reoffending and break the incarceration cycle… Drawing on cutting-edge economic research and real-world experiments, the book presents a blueprint for reform that runs all the way through the system. Doleac shows how economists like herself approach big, complicated problems as if they were scientists in a lab, carefully testing different approaches and following the data to maximize impact. She explains how shifting the incentives people face can produce dramatic changes in the decisions they make, significantly reducing the number of people cycling through the prison system. Jen and Cardiff discuss the unique approach and contributions of economists to understanding the criminal justice system, why erring towards leniency so often leads to less reoffending, and the surprising failures of ideas that seem sensible. Along the way they examine the evidence needed to answer questions like: How long should prison sentences be? How should probation be structured? For people who do go to prison, what kinds of incentives should we give them for how they spend their time there, how they rehabilitate themselves? How should we take into account variables like age or mental health? And what happens when someone gets out of prison? What are the best policies to put them on the path to success?Jen herself has spearheaded a lot of the research behind this evidence, and she also has detailed knowledge of the work done by other economists in the field. So she’s about as well positioned to evaluate it as anyone Cardiff knows.And her work is about more than just using limited resources in the best possible way (although that’s great) and more than just making society better and safer (also great). It’s about finding ways to help individuals get their lives back on track, so that a mistake made early in life doesn’t end up defining everything that comes after. Related links: Science of Second Chances pre-order linksJennifer Doleac’s page at Arnold Ventures
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  The Licensing Racket 05.12.2025 1h 1m

  Nearly 30 million workers, or roughly one in five workers throughout the country, are required to have a professional license before they can do their jobs.That’s more than twice the number of workers who belong to unions. And it’s almost ten times the number who earn the minimum wage. But in comparison to those other economic arrangements, curiously little attention is given to the process that governs licensing, the perverse outcomes it so often leads to, and the vulnerable workers who are affected by it. Cardiff’s guest on this episode is Vanderbilt law professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth, author of “The Licensing Racket: How we decide who is allowed to work, and Why it goes wrong.” Among Cardiff’s picks for the economics book of the year, it is the product of not just a scholarly understanding of the topic, but of years and years of painstaking reporting, interviewing hundreds of people, and unearthing a variety of frankly shocking anecdotes. She and Cardiff discuss: The legal and institutional design behind the boards that oversee licensing in each stateHow the desire to protect the already licensed leads board to impose outrageous requirements for new licensesThe ludicrous rationalizations of so many licensing boards for erecting obstacles to new workers entering their professions The shocking failure of licensing boards, especially within medicine, to actually fulfill the mission they are set up to pursue: protect public safetyHow the ratcheting up of licensing requirements led to a standoff between nurses and doctorsHow licensing hurts dynamism and entrepreneurshipThe more substantive tradeoffs involved in licensing, including the pride and validation that existing practitioners feel in having a licenseWhich jobs shouldn’t require a license, and for those that do, a better way forward All throughout, Rebecca shares with Cardiff the tales of the workers, board members, and the others she interviewed.Related links: The Licensing Racket, by Rebecca Haw AllensworthRebecca Haw Allensworth page at Vanderbilt Law School
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  The surprising economics of the world’s most valuable asset 20.11.2025 1h

  Mike Bird, the Wall Street editor of The Economist, joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset.By one estimate, the value of land makes up roughly a third of all the wealth in the entire world. Add the houses and commercial buildings on top of the land and the total value is almost two-thirds. And according to Mike, land “defies some of the usual laws of capitalism that apply to other goods and assets.” Its supply is fixed, it is immobile, and it neither decays nor depreciates. These special qualities have given land its fascinating history. They’re also the reason that so many economies end up in what Mike refers to as the land trap.Mike and Cardiff discuss: The definition of a land trapWhy booming land values are a problem while they’re rising and not just because they often set the stage for a bustHow land affects older, established companies differently than newer, innovative businesses — and why that matters for the economy The perverse incentives that rising land values can have on a nation’s economyThe land histories of America, China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore Land reform and the development of low-income countries The lessons of Singapore And more! Related links: The Land Trap, A New History of the World's Oldest AssetHousing booms, reallocation and productivity, by Sebastian Doerr, BIS
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  Lessons of the Rare Earths Showdown 14.11.2025 58m

  How can the United States make its economy more resilient not just to future economic shocks but the threat of such shocks from its geopolitical rivals? Arnab Datta has spent years working on this very question. In the immediate aftermath of the recent rare earths showdown between America and China, Datta and his colleagues at the Institute for Progress and Employ America published a new analysis titled How to Implement an Operation Warp Speed for Rare Earths.China’s global dominance in rare earths, acquired over decades, allows it to “gain leverage in trade negotiations, retaliate against American restrictions, degrade American and allied technological capabilities, and potentially even to entrench its dominance in downstream rare earth-dependent manufacturing supply chains,” write Datta, Saif Khan, Tim Hwang, and Tim Fist. The scope of the report extends well beyond the specific threat of a shock to America’s supply of rare earths. It speaks to the very nature of the ongoing geopolitical dispute with China itself — and more broadly, to the question of how best to respond when a single country has taken steps for decades to distort the global market of a product that the entire world depends on.Why did the United States fail to spot the emerging threat? How should it respond now — and in such a way that embraces core American economic values like competition and innovation? Related links: How to Implement an Operation Warp Speed for Rare EarthsArnab’s work at Employ AmericaArnab’s work at the Institute for Progress
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  Housing and the Politics of Place 07.11.2025 48m

  What accounts for the astonishing streak of YIMBY wins this year — and which concessions, if any, should they consider offering to the NIMBYs? Should the center-left Abundance faction be trying to persuade conservatives and not just progressives? Do struggling places need more market-based solutions (high-skilled immigration, tax incentives for investing in low-income communities) or more straightforward redistribution and pubic investment (in infrastructure, job training, internet access)? Are liberals ceding too much ground to anti-immigrant sentiment? And should the most famous museums in the world stop hoarding their artwork? Live on stage at the Economic Innovation Group’s annual Power of Place Conference in Washington, DC, Cardiff spoke with Slow Boring author Matt Yglesias about these topics and more. Matt also reflects on how things have changed since his two books, The Rent is Too Damn High and One Billion Americans, were released. They close with their respective picks for best movie of 2025 and the likely winner of the NBA Finals. Related links: Slow Boring The Rent is Too Damn HighOne Billion Americans
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  Attention and the Possibility of Persuasion 04.11.2025 1h 11m

  Jerusalem Demsas is one of Cardiff’s favorite econ and housing journalists, a previous New Bazaar guest, and now the founder and editor of The Argument, a new magazine dedicated to making “a positive, combative case for liberalism through sharp, well-argued opinion pieces, original reporting, and multimedia content that confronts the illiberal drift in our politics.” Jerusalem and Cardiff discuss: Her meaning of liberalismHow (if?) persuasion works The politics of immigration and why it matters for the economy Drawing lines vs reaching across themIf Twitter really is “acid on community” How to societally deal with short-form video addiction…… and how Jerusalem broke her own TikTok problemWhy asking if something is cringe is itself the most cringe Finally, Jerusalem makes Cardiff look and feel super old when his reference to Reality Bites flies right by her. They close by reflecting on a hopeful trend. Related links: The ArgumentOn the Housing Crisis (Jerusalem’s book of essays)Ezra Klein’s podcast interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates
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  Is the US about to fix its housing problem? 08.08.2025 1h 14m

  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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  Bubbly markets and the TACO trade 01.08.2025 1h 8m

  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 columnRob’s FT style column
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  AI and Jobs: What Do We Really Know? 16.05.2025 57m

  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 servicesHow have things changed since the launch and popularization of large language modelsEconomic growth consequences of AIWhether “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 | NBERAnswering the Call of AutomationAI-2027.comTyler Cowen - the #1 bottleneck to AI progress is humansDriverless trucks are coming and unions aren’t happy about itGenerative AI at Work
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  The US-China Trade War: Causes and Consequences 25.04.2025 52m

  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 WeaponsChina and Russia Will Not Be SplitThe Delusion of Peak ChinaEvan's Faculty Page
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  Tariffs and the global fallout 11.04.2025 1h 6m

  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 imposedThe 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 pageTrade Talks, Chad’s podcast Chad’s (updated in real time) interview with Kai RyssdalThe trade war timeline
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  Post-Bidenomics and what comes next 14.02.2025 1h 10m

  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 madeTrade policy, globalization with allies, and concerns about protectionismInflation challenges, including the impact of the American Rescue PlanUnions and worker bargaining powerThe housing supply crisis and the role of federal incentives for local reformsImmigrationAI’s possible effects on labor and productivity How an early musical career led Jared to economicsRELATED LINKSJared’s Substack newsletterJason Furman’s Foreign Affairs articleJared’s response to Furman2024 Economic Report of the PresidentEIG’s analysis on “Manufacturing jobs boom not reaching places hit by the China Shock”
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  High-skilled Immigration: The Way Ahead to Stay Ahead 31.01.2025 56m

  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: It massively boosts the rate of economic growth through its effects on entrepreneurship, innovation, and the creation of entire new industries.It reduces inequality.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 immigrationThree myths about high-skilled immigrationThe flaws in the current system A new policy vision to change itThe 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 LINKExceptional by Design, by Adam Ozimek, Connor O’Brien, and John Lettieri