Ezra Klein on the Abundance Agenda

25:18people have when they are sick is tremendous. And one thing we see in a lot of different studies and a lot of different research around health is that one of the main ways healthcare affects well -being is it reduces anxiety and depression, particularly when people get sick. And I mean, think of anybody in your life how they begin to act when they get sick throwing people with the wolves on that and saying, don't worry, we're investing a lot in basic R &D is not compassionate it and you mean. So you're in a cure a lot more cancers, say, right? If you're talking about equity, the person who dies at age 46 of cancer, Medicare doesn't save them.

25:52That's true in equity. We could increase defense spending, which would help many much poorer places around the world. It seems the opposite of equity, especially Medicare, to channel so much money to relatively wealthy older people who for sure have gotten in 65 years of life. Yeah, I just don't buy that you should begin to so radically discount the life and life quality of older people. I mean, as you know, people who are older end up at the doctor quite a lot and putting them sort of back out on the street on that. I don't think it would work. Look, the point that you could, I mean, I could come up with versions of this that I think would in some ways be a tougher philosophical test, right?

26:28What you just said, right? What if you begin to cut out half of defense spending and you move it into public health subsidies for the poor worldwide, right? Or you, you know, or for that matter, you do that with Medicare and Medicaid and all of a sudden, PEPFAR is covering everything for everybody under the poverty line in the entire world. There's a certain nationalism in this, right? I do believe you have to take care of your people, but I think that once you have accepted the basic view as I have, that health insurance is a way that is valuable to take care of people both in terms of their life outcomes and in terms of the quality of life they lead.

27:07Then I think you're in a place where zeroing it out for poor and elderly people is a bad idea on the merits and also obviously a horrific idea politically. But abundance is not just a relentless expansion of supply. You know, I do want to say that because you can push anything. One of the critiques I'm getting on the left is, finally, the opposite of the critique that you're early Scythod experiment you're offering, which is, oh, you know, here come Ezra and Derek saying all that matters is how many solar panels we build and how many drugs we invent and how many trains we build. And you know, what about the child tax credit, what about child care for everyone?

27:42And the theory here is not meant to replace every other argument in American or for that matter global politics. It doesn't say you don't need to think about child tax credits, which I intensely support. It doesn't mean you don't have to think about the provision of health insurance. It doesn't mean you don't have to think about the provision of public education. There are a certain set of problems that have become very binding on certain set of policy things that people who believe what I believe about the world should care about. I mean, I'm a Californian. I lived in California for much of the writing of this book.

28:14California is a place deranged by supply constraints. And the fact that it is deranged by supply constraints by the inability to build high -speed by the inability to build homes, by the inability to build clean energy at anything like the pace needed to reach the goals California itself has set for itself should be seen as a real problem. It doesn't mean it replaces the problem or completely moves it out of anything on the demand side or the subsidy side of the system. But it is a thing that if you are a liberal, I think who wants to be honest about the problems of liberal governance, you have to confront.

28:45But with all the talk of supply constraints, shouldn't you of all people be obsessed with fertility decline? It makes everything unaffordable. It limits the market size. Okay, so then we need to take money from somewhere and spend it on birth subsidies. I'm saying, take it from the kid. Do you think birth subsidies work? We don't know. I think we need to try the more and more extreme. I am extremely open to birth subsidies. The question of where you should take them from in the budget is an interesting one, but But I'm extremely open to birth subsidies. I think people should be paid for being parents.

29:18Part of why people do not have children earlier. So it's a huge, I'm particularly for women, a huge financial penalty that is lifelong. I am not sure we know, though, whether or not there's a birth subsidy at a level that is politically in any way viable that actually works. I would love to see any country in the world pass some non -authoritarian, like non -Romanian decades ago policy that seem to have an effect on birth rates. I do think we're gonna have, I both think we are going to have severe political problems as a society's shrink. And I like in my own sort of moral framework, I think the continuation of human experience is a beautiful and important thing in the way it has just been absorbed into a kind of liberal expressive individualism, right?

30:04You, I hear people talk about it as if it's like a good that is akin to whether or not they should take an international trip, right? one of the cost benefits, I think that's mistaken. So I'm pro trying to think about fertility. I just have not seen any policies at work. But the more uncertain we are about birth subsidies, and I agree that's the correct view. Doesn't that mean we should all the more commit to some kind of revival of cultural conservatism on matters of family, that there's an asymmetric pairing? Families should sort of be expected to have three or four children, and that that's the alternative.

30:38And yes, we should try subsidies, but the more uncertain we are, we've just got to go, you know, the Ross Dothat route. Yeah, I think he has five kids now, good for him. I think it would, so I don't think this is wrong. I just don't think it's doable. I listened to a fascinating interview between Barry Weiss and Luis Perry recently. It was a Valentine's Day interview on Barry's podcast, honestly. And Luis Perry for people don't know her is a sort of kind of conservative British, you know, petter -knock's feminist thinker. I don't exactly. Emergence Venture Swinner also. Oh, really? It is great.

31:07So she was sort of saying towards the end, as Barry was pushing her on solutions because she's making some points. She's more thinking about the kind of sexual relationships, the relationships between men and women in this podcast more than birth rates. But she's saying things like birth control at least to pill. It's not that it should be banned. It should only be available for married women. That it is good for married women to be able to space out children. But we should not take so much of the weight and the stakes and the incentive to marry off of the single -stating market. Now, it's obviously not my view, but I think it gets to what I don't think is going to work in the view you're describing here, which is when society and technology have changed so much, when you have things like the pill, when you have the opportunities we now have for people to live life of real sort of expressionism of sort of like building their identity around work, which we train people to do from a very early age.

32:08I don't know that there is a way to insert an ethic, a kind of cultural application of shaming or, you know, remoralization around this. They will substantially change behavior. If there was, I think some society already would have done it effectively. Now, Ross, right, and sort of the societies I think we would talk about here, that's coming from religion. It's not coming from just cultural conservatism, it's coming from religion. And religion is very, very, very powerful, but I don't know how we re -religionize people, right? Getting people to actually believe is different than telling them in an abstract way that, you know, birth outcomes are better and sort of society is more cohesive in Utah where the influence of the Church of Latter -day, saints is still very strong.

32:55So I actually think the sort of idea that we should just move back to a more shaming cultural conservatism has functionally all the same problems of the idea, which is like we should just have more pronatal policy, which is it just doesn't appear to work. Lots of places try it and it doesn't work hungry, it's not a huge birth success story right now, nor is Russia. So there are places that still have more of this view or have tried to reinsert it, and then at work, Israel is a little bit of a more interesting case from this perspective. But when you are there, you know, people do to some degree what they see around them.

33:27And the influence of the heredie families, of the sort of ultra orthodox families, which are huge, is everywhere. I was just in Israel, I guess not now just, but back in June. And I mean, there's obviously a lot happening that you could notice, but you really could feel the difference of being in a high fertility society there where I'd have this interaction with somebody at the park, prospect park before I had gone to Israel and he had had four kids with him and we were just been chatting and I must have said something It made him think a little bit like I was asking like what what are you doing here with four kids because he's like Oh, they're all I asked if they're all they're all his cuz they sort of look different I thought it might be a group of kids.

34:02He's like, oh, yeah But he's sort of explaining it away. He's like well, you know We don't meant to have three and then be a twins in Israel nobody's explaining away what I have four kids tons of people have four kids tons of people have six kids tons of people have eight kids so you have a society there that there is an anchor weight of just what is normal being placed by the fact that there is still a huge conservative religious community. But I think just sort of doing the, so thing I think JD Vance is trying to do when he was like scolding childless cat ladies, that doesn't appear to work.

34:31But at the macro level, it can work, right? If enough things change over enough time, keep in mind if this doesn't happen culturally, it will happen through replacement. So it happens one way or the other. I mean, that might happen. So one favors one version of it. No matter what. I mean, it could or it couldn't, right? Or, you know, as I understand there's a view that, well, if you have liberal secular societies begin to shrink, eventually it's just going to be the amish we'll take over the world maybe, or maybe as the amish society grows, they will be impinged upon by all the pressures that hit all these other societies.

35:05And within a couple generations, their birth rates will fall very rapidly. I wouldn't be surprised by that at all with you. It may not be the Amish, but whichever are the remnants of high birth rate cultures, it seems to me they will dominate. Maybe it's Niger, right? In Sahelian Africa. Yeah, but my understanding of the research on this is that while the numbers are higher in, obviously, Sub -Saharan Africa, the fertility numbers are higher, they're also on a downward trend. It seems to be a downward trend everywhere, which would make sense because you have a universal technological shock to fertility.

35:38and the richer people get the more of that shock there is. So I guess, I am not - Keep in mind though, before the pandemic, you asked what's above replacement rate. It doesn't seem so utopian to think we could get back to 2 .2, 2 .3. I'm of the view that I have two kind of contrasting views here. On the one hand, I am of the view that it seems likely that as society's shrink, they will figure out a cultural answer, or you know, paired with policy answers. So people can actually have the lives that they say they wanna have, which is lives where they marry and have two to three kids. I do think probably, I think the evidence is pretty good.

36:15The pressure there has to be on marrying younger, right? The, you know, I think you've probably seen the charts that have been going around, I think from the FT. But basically if you, you know, if people were marrying younger, the difference here is really about whether or not you get married, right? The sort of piece of leverage is on marriage. People are much more unlikely, correctly, to have children outside the context of a highly committed stable relationship. It's very, very hard to have children as a single parent. People do it, obviously. But that's going to be one of the main ingredients of fertility falling because it's just an incredibly, incredibly difficult thing to do.

36:48So there's that. It seems to me that you should be able to, practically, if you began to reorient the kind of cultural and policy machine of society to bring up the birth rate by 0 .4, right? That can't be that hard. And then you ask yourself, why doesn't anybody seem able to do it? I mean, to the extent I'm pessimistic about both the ability to control use policy here and pessimistic about the ability of culture to act in an organized fashion, right? People have chosen to change the culture and the culture at a downstream change. Is because I think that some of the societies in Asia and other places that have entered into a very rapid shrinkage and have treated it as a problem, one of them would have figured something out by now.

37:29Now maybe it just hasn't been long enough and South Korea is going to execute an amazing turnaround of this, but what I'm observing in South Korea, and frankly what I feel like I'm observing even a little bit in America, is that gender relations worsen as this happens, right? It's real. It brings everybody together to deal with this problem and think about how we can have the families we want to have and so on. Actually creates enmity, it creates scarcity, and those are very, very poor political conditions for what is both a cultural and policy project based on a kind of cross gender cohesion and long -term planning.

38:03So it seems like it should be possible, but I mean, look, you look at this as much or more than I do. I feel like you're sounding... I feel like you're sounding more optimistic than I suspect you really are. Or if you are not, then what is your answer for why no one has done it successfully yet? I genuinely don't know. I fear it's as with negative emotional contagion, another topic we've discussed offline, that once you get on it, it's hard to reverse, but it's in fact not impossible to reverse, and there are periodic historical reversals in both directions, and at some point we'll see another one.

38:36But we need some quite bracing, strong, maybe almost strousey and movement towards some version of cultural conservatism and religion to make this happen. is it cultural is it religion? I think that's both real questions. They're package. We might have a future that is religious without that much belief in God. That might be fine. So that might happen. I mean, I think one of the things I just think is true about the world is that religion is a functionally unmatched depending on which side of as you sit in like either understanding the ultimate reality that enhances human cohesion cooperation or just a cultural technology that enhances human cooperation cohesion.

39:14And as religion, weekends, belief itself, weekends, and you obviously had Rasa on it. I thought that was a fantastic conversation. But as belief itself weakens, we have not replaced that with any other technology, cultural or otherwise, that is able to create cooperation, particularly long -term cooperation, cooperation that requires sacrificing now for gains later or not even in this life with anything of even nearly matched power, worse than that, we've probably then added in a bunch of discohesive technologies like social media that make it harder to cooperate, make people more short -term oriented, make people's attention spans even weaker.

39:57And so the underlying texture of this, I think, is quite rough. I think religion, I don't really buy culture conservatism. I think it probably needs to be something like religion, but I don't, I don't think you're really able to... I don't think you can do religion instrumentally. I don't think the efforts to do that really work at mass scale. People have to believe. Let me give you another right -wing view. Tell me what you think. The notion that the most important feature of state capacity is whether a state has enough of its citizens willing to fight and die for it. And in that case, the United States is real, but a pretty small number of nations have high state capacity.

40:41And most of Western Europe really does not, because they don't have militaries that mean anything. Is that just the number one feature of abundance in state capacity? I think two things about that. So one, I think if you listen to the right in America right now, they would say we don't even have that anymore. And it's a reason that JD Vance and others sort of make this constant point that nationalism is not an idea. It is about having a physical connection to the land and the culture, usually multi -generational, that makes it enough your home that you would find a dye for it. Right? I mean, that was a major theme of Vance's R &C speech.

41:19The reason I'm not sure I think this is true is that I think that the question of whether or not people will find a dye for their country It operates very differently under actual threat than under abstract discussion. So how much would you have said Ukrainians were excited to fight and die for their country six years ago, eight years ago, 15 years ago? And it turns out they are extraordinarily heroically, courageously willing to fight and die for the country under the actual conditions of threat and invasion. And so then I think you get into kind of an interesting question about, well, what kind of state capacity in this sort of fight and die measure you really looking for?

41:56Are you asking the question of how willing are Americans to fight and die for their country if their country tells them that the defense of Taiwan is in the national interest? I'm not sure how willing Americans are going to be to do that. How long would they be to fight and die for their country if China was sending, you know, armed divisions landing on, you know, the shores of America? Probably much more so. So I think some of what we're talking there about state capacity reflects actually the success of peaceful institutions over a long period of time and the way in which it will turn around is under conditions that we should not want to see coming.

42:30But they're probably coming. I mean, doesn't America have a remarkable record? Say with Latino soldiers, maybe not born in this country, but who exhibit extreme bravery in recent times, fighting for causes in Iraq, Afghanistan that are quite obscure in some way, right? Now, they were told it's important, but American soldiers are amongst the best in the world. And America does that. Israel, I know there's an issue with Heridi, but Israel clearly does that. You go to a West, you know, Germany and you tell people, well, this is how it's going to be. I think there's just no enthusiasm. People haven't grown up, you know, with guns or a martial spirit.

43:10There's a culture of vacation. It just seems like an obvious, huge gap to me where America is clearly in the lead. Ukraine, great Israel, but not many places. And that's how we should think about state capacity. Don't you think in Germany, though, that that reflects a Absorbed view of maybe that Marshall is not as if there is something in the German people that is unwilling to For sure that's why they don't have state capacity. But if you went to the Dutch, I don't think you would see so much more Enthusiasm or try Luxembourg, you know, I think it's Switzerland would be an outlier. I think the place where we probably disagree on this is that I think under conditions of threat that would change very rapidly.

43:49And I guess you could say, right, this is definitely a view of many people hold, which is that our societies have become soft under conditions of too little threat. And you're, of course, right about the extraordinary success the American military has integrating immigrants, integrating first generation Americans. It's again a reason why I think that part of JD Vance of Speech was let's call unkinded as a very low level because like plenty of people Fight and die for this country who do not have seven generations buried in the same Kentucky graveyard But I at the same time think that there is kind of something missing about it So something is jogged for me is you read the book.

44:25Where's my flying car? Where what is the name of the author? I'm just blanking on it at the most stores. Yeah, there are stores So he's got an entire section in that book where he is arguing that one reason we have simply ceased inventing and ceased having the sort of heroic entrepreneurial energy to invent is that we are not sufficiently exposed, countries are not sufficiently exposed to invasion anymore. And he basically says, look, like there was a, you know, from much of human history before we had all these, you know, annoying liberal, all this annoying liberal internationalism. If you were an underperforming society, you could simply be swallowed up by the overperforming society next door.

45:00And now we don't let that happen. And that allows a kind of softness and stagnation to take root and infect societies. And I just think if that were true, among other things, America would not be as dynamic as society as it is because we are much less exposed to invasion. There's a lot of societies that exist under that kind of martial threat. And for that reason, have ended up with very martial cultures, at least for long periods of time. Don't seem to have that dynamism, right? I don't think we would look at the a bunch of the countries in Africa that have been fighting wars for some decades now, you know, on and off and say, wow, that's amazing state capacity there.

45:33So I think there's some, I think there's something wrong with this theory because I don't think it predicts enough about what societies are doing well and what societies are doing poorly and in what ways. What should government, the US federal government do to prepare for AGI? We should just lay off people, right? I would not say it that way. I wouldn't say just lay people. I think that's not just but you know, step one. I wouldn't I mean, do you think that's step one? Do you buy this doge's preparation for a GI argument? Maybe a fifth of them, a fifth of them think that maybe it's step two or step three, but it's a pretty early step, right?

46:09I think that the question of AI of AGI in the federal government in anywhere, and this one reason I've not bought this argument about doge is you have to ask, well, what is this AI or AGI doing? What is its value function? What prompt have you given it? What have you asked it to execute across the government and how, right? Alignment, which we have primarily talked about in terms of whether or not the AI, the superintelligence, makes us all into paperclips is a constant question of just near -term systems as well. And I think the question of how should we prepare for AGI or for AI in the federal government?

46:48So first has to do with deciding what we would like the AI or the HDI to do, that could be different things, different areas. My sense from talking to a bunch of people in the companies has sort of helped me conceptualize this better, is that the first thing I would do is sort of begin to ask, what do I think the opportunities of AI are scientifically and in terms of different kinds of discoveries? So let's take drug development. I am pretty convinced that within the next five to 10 years, that the set of tools we are developing using AI, not all of it AGI, some of it are narrow systems like the alpha -fold system, should get us to the place where the systems are developing much higher probability, molecules with much higher probability of actually making it through trial and doing something beneficial in the human body.

47:38I think we are getting better sort of models of different parts of the human body right, Arcus trying to create a cell model right now and I think this is going to work. So then I think you need to actually ask, how do you prepare other parts of the system to absorb what in theory will be a rapid increase in valuable candidates? Yes, some more bureaucrats for the FDA if we need them. Even though AI could evaluate those drugs, but a lot of government we could just play do like you'll also need to make it much, much easier to get rats, monkeys, and human beings for testing, right? That would be another piece of that's actually extremely difficult right now.

48:16And I think you've got to go sort of one by one like that. I mean, one of the reasons I'm not probably in agreement that the first thing you're going to want to do with AI is lay a bunch of people off. Is it the first thing AI is going to do is create much more of something, some kind of information that is going to overwhelm choke points somewhere. So if what you're basically doing with AI in terms of thinking about opportunities is well, the AI is about to proper a much higher hit rate of good things we should do, then probably, at least for some period of time, you need a higher rate of ways to do them.

48:49Now that doesn't mean we should reallocate labor to the growing sectors, right? So that would be more people in the FDA lay people off other places, and then when you have bottlenecks, throw labor at them if that's what's called for. But you can't just always think the number of people working in the government. No, I don't always think the number... Well, I actually probably think that the, I mean, as you know, the civilian side of the federal government has held steady about two million people since what is it the fifties? Consultants, whatever one wants to do. Well, I think you would not want that, right?

49:15I think you would actually want to, I mean, this is something I sort of talk about in the book. I think you'd actually want to insource a lot of what the government does. Look, the reason I am, I'm being squirrely at this moment, I will give you a non -squirrely answer now, is because I don't like the way Musk is doing it. If you would ask me three months ago, and I believe today what I believe three months ago, I would have said the civil service rules we have are archaic. They may get much too difficult to hire and fire. They may get much too difficult to reorganize systems. It actually is the case, say what you will about whether or not you think what they're doing is a good idea.

49:46It is the case that it used to be much more in the president's power to reorganize, create, fold agencies, sub agencies, et cetera. And we have, I think, made it too hard by a lot to restructure and manage the administrative state. And so the thing that I would like to do is create much more flexibility and much more power with the people we call bureaucrats. I would like people to have much more agency, much more ability to, yeah, to actually hire and fire. I would not want to do it indiscriminately, right? The idea that just everybody in the federal workforce is probably bad and on the margin getting rid of any of them for any reason is probably good.

50:27It is just not an idea I share. So the thing where they fired all the probationary employees, that was disproportionately young people and people who had just had promotions. I'm not sure that's happening, by the way. I know it's been in media, but I've known people have gotten fired through, I guess I would say. So something seems to be happening around that. I'm not sure they've done it at the mass level, but they do appear to have done it to some degree in some places. They, I am seeing a lot of extremely indiscriminate work doing, you know, people who, for instance, it took a long time to recruit into the federal government because it was hard and they had to get exemptions in order to give them sort of higher pay, right?

50:59That's a thing that happens a lot. And it's like a long time if you're a critic fighting. On the one hand, that it took so long to get them in, is a problem I want to solve. On the other hand, indiscriminately now knocking them out is not something I would like to see. So the question of how to, I think the question of how to read either government for AI is a real one. I would like to see a little bit of what this AI looks like before I start doing mass -firing to support it. And I would like to decide, like actually describe, aims for this AI. So you just you said this a couple times what's the aims of the AI be right?

51:30You're not like a person who Just thinks of the category of AI's Undifferentiated you need to tell it what you want it to do or at least tell it what you wanted to figure out to do Like what what is it doing here? I'm struck by how small many companies can become so mid -journey Which you're familiar with at the peak of its innovation was eight people and that was not mainly a story about consultants Sam Altman says it will be possible to have billion dollar companies run by one person. I suspect that's two or three people, but nonetheless, that seems not so far off. So it seems to me there really ought to be significant parts of the government by no means all where you could have a much smaller number of people directing the AIs.

52:13It would be the same people at the top giving the orders is today more or less and just a lot fewer staff. I don't see how that can't be the case. I agree with you that in theory should be the case. But I do think that as you actually see it emerge from, like in theory should be the case, do we figure out a way to do it? It's going to turn out that things a federal government does are not all that like, type up like an image prompt into a thing. But it's so hard to get rid of people. Don't you need to start with a chain saw? It array, you know, maybe the next democratic administration rehires what's needed.

52:48I don't think you start with a change on this way, because one, you're breaking things right now that AI is not about to fix. I think you have to have a very low opinion of the federal government and what the people need to do. And maybe we have different opinions of those, probably, to think this is all going to be, you're not going to break things that were needed. And I worry that a lot of things I'm seeing them break, right? People who I know who worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on financial scams, I don't think knocking them out of government is going to create a macro problem in the US economy.

53:17But I do know these people were getting money back for consumers who had gotten scammed. And I frankly, I think the capacity to scam people on AI is about to go much higher. And so I think that a good thing that was happening is going to happen less well right now. My gut is that AI as it emerges into the kind of view and flexibility where we could integrate it into core systems, which it's not at yet in most cases, is going to create places where you need to expand and places where you need to contract. So that's That's why I was sort of trying to ground this in an actual example, like drug development.

53:47If it is throwing off way, way, way more good candidates for drug development, yes, are parts of the system that can contract, parts of it they're going to need to expand. Energy, again, it's like if you read any of these projects, right? Or any of these slightly more utopic visions of AI, which I certainly hope are going to live in, the idea is that it's going to throw off a bunch of realizations and discoveries about how we can make much more energy dense materials and so lay down everything from solar panels to get better doing advanced geothermal. And that would mean some parts of DOE may become less important.

54:21It would also mean our ability to permit and do other things becomes more important. I am not sure particularly at the beginning what you need is less so much as the ability to reallocate. Now look, your view that you do mass firings and then you hire back what you need. I mean, I guess I understand where you're coming from on that, but I want to see the thing we are doing, the firings for working first, not fire people and hope that Sam Altman's view of billion dollar companies with three people is actually going to work at the Social Security Administration in the year of our Lord 2027. But you know, full well, Steve Talis' work on clutchocracy, right?

54:59We have at least 50 years of the clutch is just accumulating. Everything, everyone in government knows about this. It's not some secret. Various administrations have tried to address it. You know, Al Gore did a bit. That was fine, but it didn't really stop it. So I don't see that there's any other recipe besides quite a bit of disruption. Again, there'll be future administrations to sort it out, like the new deal agencies. They weren't so great to begin with. They didn't have experience or data or staffing, but over time pieces fell into place. and maybe the options are just more and more as Steve Teller's pledgeocracy, or we take some chances today and do some things that actually hurt, right?

55:38And then over eight to 12 year period sorted out with AI and most of all with future administrations. I don't really see what the alternative is. I think there are two questions here. Let's say there's a good version of this and a bad version of this. And I'll sort of outline the way I see both. Let me start with a good version of this. If I was saying sort of what I hope the story of this period will ultimately be like I have to sort of describe this like thesis Antithesis and synthesis, which I think is a little bit of what you're saying my critique of Democrats is it became Culturally process and bureaucracy obsessed they they they saw like the state and Inside their own agencies inside things they in theory run They were anything a lawyer said you had to take his holy writ, right?

56:25No matter how off the wall or stringent the interpretation of what was clearly a looser original statute was, you like it was careful, they every process had to be followed to a T. And Democrats and through the party of government cannot run government effectively because for all the some of the reasons you just described it some of the reasons I just described. So then incomes, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk. And if they have proven anything, it is that a lot of the things that previous administrations. By the way, Democratic and Republican treated is inviolable. We're just not. They weren't real.

57:00They were norms, not rules, norms, not laws. It is clear that some of the firings are illegal. Clearly not all of them. It is clear that some of the withholding of money is illegal. My gut is, you know, having seen the 5 -4 decision the other day at the Supreme Court, which went against the Trump administration, but it was a 5 -4 decision. It's not going to be all of it. There is a lesson that is being taught here by Musk, which I think liberals have to look at very uncomfortably, which is that things that they treated as facts of the system that could not be in any way altered and then used as excuses for low performing government services for genuinely like probably what Elon Musk is calling waste and what I would call waste are not the same thing, but there is what I would think of as a lot of waste.

57:48They allow a civil service system to emerge and evolve that everybody knows is crazy. Everybody knows it's crazy. And so here comes Musk and Trump and Tathesis, right? I don't think they're trying to make things work. I don't think the zero -based budgeting. I don't think they're holding things to a standard. I think they have cut off huge amounts of life -saving work. I think they are creating a lot of risk in parts of the system that can really blow up. I think what they want is control, not a working government. No, I'm not defending what they are doing, but I'm not saying you're, well, I think you a little, at least I think on the margin, I have a point that is the approach or necessary.

58:23It's not even clear to me what they're doing. And my hope, I think it's not always clear to them. And then my hope is that the next administration, if there's all this in blowup and our faces in a truly terrible way, is able to do synthesis, right, which is to not try to destroy the federal government, but to take the lesson of doge seriously, that a lot of what liberals, a lot of what the establishment was treating as it just has to be this way. These are the rules, these are the processes. There's nothing to be done about it. No, it actually seems you can do quite a lot of it. I mean, I've thought a lot about the payment systems and the treasury privacy data.

58:57And how many social insurance programs work poorly because they couldn't get any access to that data? Like I've heard about this a lot in the design systems beforehand. And it should not do not be the case. You could get access to the data if you really wanted it. There's no reason we needed to have the software procurement systems led to healthcare .gov. We just didn't. And it is true that then over time, this has been adapted somewhat in that area, USGS, US Digital Service, and 18F were significant there and they've sort of destroyed them. But there was a lot you could do. So that I think is the good, the good version where what we've had is a kind of fire.

59:30And it'll do things that I am very unhappy about. But it will also open the way to something that is not as relentlessly and illogically as bureaucratized as the way government was run under say the Biden administration and it's not as destructive and corrupted as what we're seeing under Trump and Musk. I think the bad version of, there's no choice but we have to come in and do something like this, is it they actually don't know what they're doing. This isn't zero -based budgeting, they don't know who they're firing, they don't really know what the people do, right? They've not evaluated things on a cost -benefit scale, they're trying to use loopholes.

1:00:05And it does turn out that the system manages a lot of risk. And, you know, most of the risk it manages in any given year, it's going to be fine if you don't have anybody there managing it. But when then things do go wrong, when you do roll snake eyes and you always do eventually, it's going to turn out we really needed some of this, right? And you see them, they kind of like freaking out about this on the daily, basically, right? They go fire all these people who are on nuclear safety and don't even realize they've done it and then are desperately trying to get back in touch with them to come back.

1:00:33So we don't have huge problems in the nuclear system or you know, Musk saying that he didn't mean to turn off all the payments on the sort of Ebola work But it turns out they did and then saying that he turned it back on and in fact you talked to people on the ground there And he didn't so I'm worried about risk exploding which is why I wouldn't have wanted to see it done this way But I think that people who are in my position and I think people care about effective government really need to look with some anger and shame about the way in which the people believe in government basically gave up on government reform and Left that to this kind of process If we think steady state when I look at the private sector it seems to me large Foundations charitable foundations.

1:01:16They're not better run than smaller ones on average Mm -hmm if someone says well five years from now we could have a USAID that maybe even gives away more money is more effective And total personnel is three or four hundred people plus AGI. That seems entirely plausible to me, and actually a good goal. Like, could you imagine supporting, you know, a future vision for USAID with 350 employees plus AGI way, way, way less with the US -based contractors? Get rid of that part of the law. That's just domestic wealth, corporate cronyism, welfare, and give away more money and have way fewer people. Why isn't that a good vision?

1:01:54I could imagine that. I think USAID is a weird one to imagine. We work like that because I think what you would then get. I mean, somebody is actually providing somewhere what USAID provides. And if it's not the contractors like out there working in Africa and working in Latin America and working in other places, like if you imagine, let me try to flesh this vision out, right? Let's say you fire, you know, USAID is functionally gutted now. So you're going to be down at that sort of low level of staffing. And then you have, you know, in 2028, we have something we're willing to call AGI. And you're basically getting AGI to do the work that Givwell was doing, right, at a sort of more AGI -like level and evaluate what is the highest benefit per dollar that we can spend through USAID and it's doing a better job of that.

1:02:39Then of course, like that is going to have to be spent out in the real world. Vaccines have to go into people's arms, HIV, AIDS, Retrobi, drugs have to be handed to people. The AGI is not going to do that. And so then you have this question of in this world, are you expanding staffing somewhere? I'm fine with that world. My disagreement with what is happening right now is that I really think it is important to be clear that the discriminant about whether or not we should be doing aid, right? Not over what aid is effective. They could have gone in and restructured USAID and what it spends money on.

1:03:13They have not articulated any desire to save lives of people in other countries. at all. And this is where I think this kind of conversation can get a little hiding the ball. I think its efficiency is always towards what? Right? You know, what are you trying to make more efficient? And there are always values in that. And the language of efficiency is often the way of trying to hide the values. But yes, the question hypothetically, could you imagine a world, where aggressive reform of USAID led to a USAID that was much more laser focused on public health provision and maybe some forms of functionally cast transfer programs and probably support for certain kinds of government functions in other countries.

1:04:01And administering that required much less administrative staff in Washington and in the US absolutely. But that's a goal you can define and work towards right now. AGI is not even really doing anything in that hypothetical. What's doing something in the hypothetical is having a coherent vision of foreign aid and then a willingness to upend the bureaucracy to achieve it, which on the one hand, I don't think you've seen necessarily from a lot of the nonprofit industrial complexes it gets called, but on the other hand, on the values of it, you certainly have not seen from this crew. at the end of your podcast you ask your guests to recommend three books maybe they've been reading lately I'll ask you to recommend three travel spots it doesn't have to have been recent and it could be around the block in Brooklyn it could be anywhere but tell us just three spots where people ought to go or think about and why they're interesting or important to you so my father's Brazilian.

1:04:58And I've been to Brazil many times. And I think of Rio Dijonero as one of, I just believe it is one of the most beautiful and vibrant and dynamic and exciting cities in the world. And Brazil itself is just tremendous. It is one of those countries you could spend a lifetime exploring and never reach the terminal point of it. And there's so much I have not done there. So Brazil just itself, to me, you could pick all kinds of places, start with Rio, but try to travel out of Rio. Go to some of the sort of spots where Brazilians vacation in the summer. There's a place that I went with my father to a conference when I was young, called Baja Duca -E, which kind of an island, you can see your feet in the water.

1:05:48I was young, so I'm not sure how accurate my impressions of it are, but it sits in my head like a kind of Shangri -la, like I just, I love it. And I've had a lot of experiences and present like that. That's one I love Berlin as a city. Now, partially this is because I'm into electronic music, and it's a city that takes off, electronic music incredibly seriously. And so you have just this remarkable mixture of nightlife that I find really, really exciting and really vibrant. It's just a fun city to walk around. It has great museums, it has great food, people are friendly, there are a lot of immigrants, right?

1:06:22there's a lot to see and there's sort of a thing to experience there that I just like so I'm not sure it'd be exactly true for everybody although I think probably even people with radically different tastes in mind but find a lot to love in Berlin but if you have my specific tastes Berlin is just an extraordinary place to go I spent a week there last year and if I could I think I would spend a couple weeks every year it's one of the places Mexico City being the other where I've landed and spend some time and just immediately had the view I could live here. Right, I could just do this. It would be wonderful.

1:06:53I am just a huge fan of American second cities and I travel a lot around music. And so I guess one of the others, I go to a lot of music festivals in small places. Not all electronic. One of my favorites is one called Big Year's in Knoxville. And it's a lot of folk music. It's a lot of experimental music. But Knoxville is just a great place and a great city, and again, the food is great. I think in general at this point, the food in places, like Knoxville, like all kinds of smaller cities are just better than in the really big cities because so many people have been costed out. Like, San Francisco's food just isn't good anymore.

1:07:32It's like not a good food city hasn't ever sometime. It's one of the most disappointing things to me about living there. You know, California cuisine used to be so vibrant, but I think now isn't. And it's just because we've pushed the people who could make it out like the labor costs are too high, etc. So I think actually traveling around America itself is as you would say, underrated and as somebody who tends to like urban travel, that's part of it. I guess I did three there, so I shouldn't keep going. Four, if you can't make Sikho City a plug again for the book Abundance by Ezra Klein in Derek Thompson.

1:08:04Wonderful book. I recommend it to everyone. Ezra, thank you very much. Thank you, Tyler, really enjoyed it. Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm At Tyler Cowan, and the show is At Cowan Convose. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.