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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?
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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.
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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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
* 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.
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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.
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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:
…and more!
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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:
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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:
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:
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.
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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.
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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
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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:
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.
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"The introverts have taken over the US economy."
That's the provocative title of a recent Bloomberg column from economist Allison Schrager. As she looked into the data on how Americans have been spending their time since the pandemic, she noticed that they are spending less time socializing with their friends on weekends and more time in front of screens. Even when they do go out, it's increasingly for an early dinner. That's all in addition to the bigger share of Americans who now work remotely, a trend that accelerated during the pandemic and is unlikely to ever fully reverse.
Who are the winners and losers from these trends? And what's going on?
Obvious explanations include pandemic experimentation, smartphones, better entertainment and telecommunications technologies. But Allison also likes to see these trends through the prism of risk. She tells Cardiff that the "risk-free rate" that Americans can earn from indoor, introverted activity has climbed. With so much choice over the movies, music, and books you can consume in your home, not to mention access to social media and swipe-able dating apps, you are guaranteed to have at least a pretty good time by staying in. Going out means making an "investment" with possibly more upside (meet the love of your life, see a memorable live performance, attend an epic party) but also a vastly more uncertain payoff.
Allison and Cardiff discuss these ideas and whether the economy's new introvert-friendliness is likely to stay. They also talk about other trends that could soon favor extroverts, the risks of AI and automation in the labor market, and the skills and traits that will matter for the jobs of the future.
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When people talk about the crisis at the border between the US and Mexico, what specifically are they referring to?
The Department of Homeland Security keeps track of a statistic called “border encounters” at the US border with Mexico. This includes primarily the large number of people who try to cross the border without documentation, or illegally, and aren't crossing at a formal port of entry. It also includes people who do try to cross the border at a port of entry but who are then found not eligible to be admitted into the US.
In the past three years, under the Biden administration, the number of these border encounters each year has been more than quadruple the average of what it was throughout most of the previous decade, under the Trump and Obama administrations.
The system for processing all these migrants has been entirely overwhelmed. And if you’re a politician or a pundit or someone else pushing an agenda, the temptation is to make it political. To argue that this is either all Joe Biden’s fault for being "too soft" on immigration, or the fault of Donald Trump for not fixing the problem sooner, or Congress for refusing to collaborate on a bill that would address the issue.
Today’s guest does something different altogether. Andrew Selee is the head of the Migration Policy Institute, or MPI, which is the think tank Cardiff turns to when he wants factual, nonpartisan, non-stupid commentary on immigration—but especially when he just wants to inform himself on the topic outside the nonsense of how debates on immigration tend to play out in public.
So Cardiff speaks with Andrew about the real, fundamental reasons behind the crisis at the border, and what can be done about it.
They also talk about legal immigration, which despite many problems has actually been a kind of quiet success of recent years.
Other topics they discuss include the two eras of border management, the multi-layered effects of the pandemic on immigration, and a new idea for how to reform immigration to become more responsive to the needs of the US labor market.
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Who is the Magic Johnson of economics? Who was the Adam Smith of basketball?
On this fun and oddball episode of The New Bazaar, Cardiff speaks with Tyler Cowen, economist and author of GOAT: Who is the Greatest Economist of all Time and Why Does it Matter?
Inspired by the sportswriter Bill Simmons, Tyler wrote his book from the standpoint of a fan—having fun, taking sides, admitting biases, unapologetically trying to entertain the reader instead of presenting sober (boring) analysis.
Cardiff and Tyler—both huge basketball fans—first discuss Tyler's ranking of the great economists and his lament for what economics used to be. Tyler also gives his reasons for releasing the book as a ChatGPT trained on its text, the first such book of its kind.
Then begins the fun. They take turns finding analogs for the great economists from the history of the NBA. And they do the same in reverse for basketball's own GOATs. Which economist changed the nature of the field similar to the way Steph Curry set off the three-point revolution? Is there an economist whose comprehensive genius rivaled the ability of LeBron James to engineer exactly the outcome he wants on the court? What basketball player matched the charisma, brilliance, and even investment success of Keynes?
And why does Cardiff argue that Tyler himself is the Charles Barkley of economists despite their differences in personality, size, and other obvious dimensions?
All throughout the chat, Tyler and Cardiff are exploring the common traits that define greatness in both hoops, the social sciences, and perhaps other domains. A treat for fans of either economics or hoops, or who simply enjoy the virtues of fandom itself.
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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz has unusually written an unusual book.
The data analysis included in "Who Makes the NBA?: Data-Driven Answers to Basketball's Biggest Questions" normally would have taken Seth, a trained economist, multiple years of writing and running code. But because of new artificial intelligence tools, he finished the book in just thirty days. And he used AI tools not just for the coding, but also for the artwork, copy editing, and even to write the appendix.
He discusses with Cardiff the lessons he learned about using AI, and what such accelerated productivity might mean for the future of the labor market.
Then they discuss the actual findings in the book, an investigation into the backgrounds of the basketball players who make it to the NBA and succeed when they get there. How much of success is genetic? What accounts for the NBA's market failures—the traits of players who get paid too much and too little relative to their contributions? Why do some foreign countries have such astonishing success at sending players to the NBA? Does the choice of college really matter for future success?
The answers to these questions are surprisingly revealing about the experiences of non-basketball players, and about the relationships between luck, skill, parenting, undiscovered talent, the economy, and other familiar variables.
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Martha Gimbel and Gopi Shah Goda were formerly economists within the White House Council of Economic Advisors, or CEA.
They look back on their time inside an important economic policymaking institution, telling Cardiff about:
And Martha clears up a big misunderstanding about an infamous graph controversy. All this and more!
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Angus Deaton—Scottish immigrant, Nobelist, and one of Cardiff's favorite economists—has written a new, forthcoming book titled Economics in America: An Immigrant Economist Explore the Land of Inequality.
It’s great, if also hard to categorize.
Partly it’s a memoir, about his humble origins in Scotland, where he was born; his studies at Cambridge with better-heeled peers; and his subsequent decades as a Princeton University, Nobel Prize winning economist.
The book is also partly a reflection on a lifetime of practicing economics, and the good and bad of the economics profession. There's plenty of both.
And finally it’s a series of observations about the American economy, including a fascinating self-analysis of his own ambivalence towards the US, his adopted country—the many great things here, including the lives that he and his family have led; and also, yes, some of the devastatingly grim things about life here for so many others.
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