YouSaid · the spoken record

Arthur Kroeber

lines on the record: 156
first: 2025-06-19
most recent: 2025-06-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Power, wealth, industrial might into a world in a way that societies around the world can tolerate. It's a legitimately difficult problem. And I think a lot of the problems have to do not with China but with US domestic policy. So I think a lot of what's going on right now is scapegoating of China as a way of diverting attention from decisions that need to be made domestically about income redistribution and macroeconomic policy and so forth. But there is also, I think, a legitimate question to be made about China now accounts for 20% of the global economy, probably will be larger in future. A third of the global manufacturing economy”
2025-06-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the world improves a lot. I think that's clearly true. But I think if you look at what has happened to the US politically over the last 20 years, there are a lot of flies in that ointment. And the fly is that it is important for large countries to be able to maintain a diversified production structure and maintain kind of social cohesion. If you lose the capacity to run a manufacturing economy that employs large numbers of people, there's a lot of disruptions that come as a result of that. And the purely financialized economy that we had grow up in the United States in the early 2000s is a result of this bargain with China wound up being pretty bad for the social compact. So I think there is a legitimate question about how do you integrate China's growing”
2025-06-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heading towards sort of a world of convergence of systems where everyone is essentially playing by the same rules. And China really gets in the way of that narrative because it is incredibly successful authoritarian system where the ruling party still calls itself communist. U.S. elites have never to this day really gotten comfortable with the idea that the Chinese political system is legitimate. And as long as you have that kind of underlying problem, I think it's going to be very difficult to erase these difficulties. And then on the economic side, I think it is a problem the way that China has chosen to organize its economy. Yeah, in a strictly financial sense, if you will, the rest of the world comes out ahead in the sense that China is willing to subsidize a lot of low-cost production. So the rest of the world gets a lot of cheap goods. And the overall welfare...”
2025-06-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there are a couple of things beneath that. One is the systemic difference politically Israeli importance, right? So the US self-identity is of the leader of democracies around the world, and we are very invested, at least for now in our democratic system. We'll see how that evolves over the next two or three years. There's some question marks around that. But historically, that's been a really huge part of the U.S. identity. And basically, the morality play of World War II and the Cold War, which has really been the crucible in which U.S. foreign policy has been formed, is that you had an alliance of democracies that fought back first against fascism, then against communism. They won. And the result was that you created a world where most major countries were democratic. They operated on market economic systems.”
2025-06-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other people can participate in, or does it grow rich by essentially making it impossible for anyone else in the world to have the kind of production structure that they want to have and relying entirely on these ever-growing trade surpluses? In general, in principle, from a welfare standpoint, it would be great if China got to be as rich as everywhere else in the world, even as rich as America. But that is likely to have some pretty difficult and destabilizing political consequences because of the vast differences between the Chinese political system and the U.S. political system and the political systems of all the other major industrialized countries.”
2025-06-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a very good question. It's a very good question. There's a lot of criticism of China from the standpoint of, okay, you're trying to get rich, that's fine, okay, but you're basically trying to get rich on the backs of everyone else in the world by running this gigantic manufacturing export machine where it seems like the Chinese ambition is to produce all the manufactured goods in the world for everyone, run in enormous trade surplus, which means that they are depending on other people's buying power to support them, and that this is basically not fair, not sustainable, not a stable way to participate in the global economy. So that's more of a question not of if China does get rich, but how does it get rich? Does it get rich by essentially operating on the same rules as everyone else and having a market that”
2025-06-19 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Why China's manufacturing economy is dominating — Arthur Kroeber · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source