The New Bazaar

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:

• Paul’s hippie-punching days in the 1990s
• How economic geography has changed through the decades
• Whether place-based policy works
• Why a previous regret no longer bothers him much
• How Paul blends style and substance in his writing
• Why Democrats seem so bad at running big cities
• The work Paul is most proud of

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.

RELATED LINKS:

• Incidents from my Career
• How I Work
• What isn’t the matter with American Workers
• TPP at the NABE
• How Trump Is Undermining the Economy in Some Struggling Cities
• Geography and Trade

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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.

Related links:

• Biden at the Three-Year Mark
• Shifting Realities at the U.S.-Mexico Border
• Migration at the U.S.-Mexico Border: A Challenge Decades in the Making
• A New Way Forward for Employment-Based Immigration: The Bridge Visa

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The combination of a markets-based capitalist economy and a liberal democracy with almost-universal suffrage is very young, having existed for barely more than a century. But what we’ve learned in that short time is that there has never been a more successful political and societal arrangement. None of the tyrannies and the plutocracies that have been the default for nearly all of human history has ever been nearly as good at raising people’s living standards, and at giving people the individual freedoms to choose how they live their lives.

But that marriage between capitalism and democracy has always been a fragile one. And in the last decade or two, that system has been under threat from within the very liberal democracies where it exists, especially in the US and across parts of Europe. What happened?

The guest for this episode is Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times and author of a new book called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. As Martin writes:

Martin discusses these themes with Cardiff, what should be done to confront this crisis of democratic capitalism, what a "New New Deal" can look like, the threat (and opportunity) of China as a global superpower, and how Martin's own personal history influenced his values and thinking.

Related links:

• The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
• Martin's columns at the Financial Times

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More than two decades ago, economist Tyler Cowen published "In Praise of Commercial Culture" -- his first in a series of books about the relationship between the economy and culture.

The book's thesis was simple, but at the time controversial -- that markets and commerce offer the best societal arrangement for promoting creativity and cultural novelty. The book was initially resisted by popular and academic presses and nearly didn't get published, threatening to undermine its own arguments.

In the book, Tyler argues that markets are not just good for artists themselves and how they make a living, but for the quality and the originality of their work. He responds to right-wing critics who argue that a culture rooted in the artistic creations of markets becomes too permissive, and to left-wing critics who say that the profit motive inherent to markets is bad for artistic purity and integrity. Tyler argues that if you really care about creativity – and about diverse groups having access to becoming creators and artists – then markets are better than previous systems based on patronage, or on the direction of the state or the church.

In his chat with Cardiff, Tyler revisits his original arguments, considering them anew to account for all that's happened in the time since the book was published in 2000. What have been the effects on creativity of the dominance of streaming, the ubiquity of smartphones, and more recently the rise of Tiktok and NFTs?

Also on the show: Why were the Medici overrated and rap musicians underrated? Does the easy reproducibility of historically significant artistic works, made possible by new technologies, threaten to cannibalize emergent artists? Is there a meaningful distinction between high-brow and low-brow art? Where has Hollywood gone wrong? How have sports, cooking, amateur photography and other domains of life become more artistic and creative in recent decades?

Finally, Tyler and Cardiff discuss why it can be seductive and easy to become cultural pessimists -- and why both nonetheless remain cultural optimists.

LINKS:

-- In Praise of Commercial Culture (Harvard University Press)

-- Marginal Revolution (Tyler's blog with Alex Tabarrok)

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Erich Schwartzel joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, "Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy".

For the past couple of decades, the emergence of a huge middle class in China has become an incredibly attractive, and maybe even a necessary, market for Hollywood movies.

But the Chinese government carefully censors what kinds of movies can be shown in China. So if you’re a Hollywood studio and you wanna get your movie shown in China, you have to go along with the criteria that the Chinese censors give you.

And Hollywood studios have done just that, often imposing restrictions across the entire creative process of making a movie, starting with the script itself. As Erich explains in the chat, this has fundamentally changed Hollywood’s entire business model, and the kinds of movies it makes.

The deeper story here is about the messy realities of globalization. Deepening economic engagement between nations mostly leads to more prosperity, rising standards of living, and more choices for what people can do with their lives. But it can have bad side effects, especially when the economic engagement is between two countries with different political priorities.

“Red Carpet” is all about understanding the real-world nuances of how trade with China has sometimes led to a clash of values. On the one side are things like free speech, artistic integrity, the ability to express oneself fully, through movies and other cultural objects, without fear of censorship. And on the other side are the deepening commercial ties between two countries.

Understanding this clash in all its subtlety is the aim of Erich's book, and of his chat with Cardiff.

Related link:

Red Carpet book page

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