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Tyler Cowen is an American economist, columnist, and blogger. Cowen is the Holbert L. Harris chair in economics at George Mason University, and is the co-author, with Alex Tabarrok, of the blog Marginal Revolution.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Tyler Cowen discuss the likely economic futures of Europe, Asia, and Africa; how the United States should approach competition with China; and what role young people should ascribe to personal financial advancement in their career choices.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: One of the things that I've really been trying to wrap my head around is the impact of AI. The launch of easily publicly accessible AI was now a little over two years ago, and it is clear that AI has tremendous capacities. At the same time, so far, its impact on the world has been a little bit more limited than might have been imagined two years ago. How do you see this panning out over the course of the next few years?
Tyler Cowen: I think it will take a long time to have a major impact. There are some areas such as programming where it's already doing well over half the work, or in some parts of graphic design. You use Midjourney and you get something quite nice for free and you own the intellectual property rights to it. But when it comes to institutions, they're not in general arranged so that there's some easy way to slot in extra intelligence that's not attached to a body.
I think, slowly, a lot of institutions will be rebuilt. But in some sectors, it's an immediate revolution—students cheating on tests, that's happened very quickly. Again, when it can happen quickly, it will. But I think it will be a protracted process.
Mounk: I was just grading a paper and sometimes what I do in exams, especially take-home exams, is to make up a quote and make up a name of who that quote is from and then get students to react to it as a good way of getting at some of the core concepts in the course. And unfortunately, one of my students ended up, you know, citing a made up book by this made up author, which was a pretty sure sign that they had used AI. And I can only guess at how many other students have done that as well.
For people who are not as familiar with AI as you are, what are the capacities of AI today and at what rate is it continuing to improve? Have we hit a kind of upper limit, or are we just at the very beginning of a development?
Cowen: We don't have exact answers to those questions. I do know that a year ago, AIs were given an IQ test, and one of the GPTs got 118. They were given an IQ test, I think a week or two ago, and it got 157. There are now numerous studies showing it beats human doctors when it comes to medical diagnosis, and it has a phenomenal understanding of the law. In economics, I can assure you it's quite good. Now, it depends what model you're using. Right now the best model is OpenAI's O3 Pro, which costs $2,500 a year, an amazing bargain, from my point of view. But that does the best. And there's all kinds of projections about the future, but OpenAI itself tells us that probably in about three months a new model will be coming that will have more of what is called “time scaling.” That is, it will use time better as a way of thinking better. And that's probably going to be much superior, and that's only a few months from now. So we'll see. There’s no reason to think it’s stopped.
Mounk: So explain to us how AI works now and what the trick is to further improvements. We ran an article in Persuasion making the skeptical case about AI, saying it's basically just a predictive algorithm, and we've fed all the data in, so it's sort of as good as it's going to get. I thought it was a well-argued piece, but I didn't buy the conclusion. And I was a little bit skeptical about running it, to be honest, for that reason, though part of the point of having a magazine, of course, is to run debates within it.
How would you respond to somebody making that skeptical case about both AI's capacities and its likelihood to improve further in the coming months and years?
Cowen: When proprietary systems are at stake, it's hard to make a lot of traditional arguments. I would just say the people I know who are in touch with those who actually work in the labs, those people do not believe those arguments. I think that's the most decisive evidence. It's not entirely what you would call verifiable. But the very last thing that happened with the release of O3 Pro is a move into this new dimension of what I called time scaling, just doing more compute. Are we running out of data? Have we used up everything on the internet? There's still a debate going on. But if you can teach it how to use time to think more effectively, that's a whole other dimension of improvement. Only in the last two months have those systems been available. And I would just be shocked if somehow the first iteration of those systems were the very best we were going to see. I can't prove the next generation will be better, but OpenAI says it will be better. All their predictions so far essentially have been correct. There's a lot of technical reasons to think the very first system won't be the best one. So it just seems like there's a lot more room for improvement. And then there are other possible dimensions that might improve the systems. People disagree about those, but there are plenty of startups working on yet other ways of improving AI.
But it's more intelligent than humans right now at most things. So it's not a hypothetical. It got there somehow. It's not sentient. Can it dribble a basketball? No. Can it fall in love? No. Can it pass a Turing test and beat most humans on most tests? Yes. I think in less than a year, it will beat me on an economics test. Possibly, it would beat me right now. So none of this is hypothetical.
Mounk: What do you think that should mean for young people who are trying to reflect on how to have a worthwhile professional and perhaps intellectual life for the rest of their existence on Earth?
Cowen: How about old people? How about us?
Mounk: Yeah, I was going to say, what do you think about people like you and me who are kind of somewhat stuck with the skillsets we have and the approach we have? Certainly, when it comes to the skill that I'm most proud of, that's most core to my professional identity and perhaps in some ways my personal identity, which is writing—the paid model of ChatGPT can now get a pretty reliable A-minus in grad student coursework for questions I ask. With a little bit of fine tuning and smart adaptations of the input and so on, it can probably get to an A. It's not quite at the level yet where I feel that it can rival an article that I write for my audience on my Substack, but it's certainly not unimaginable that in two or three years it might get there.
How should you or I reflect on whether there's really any point in continuing to do our professions under those circumstances?
Cowen: Well, first of all, we're not stuck. So I've made very deliberate changes in my career and routines because of this. I travel more, I go to more meetings, I spend more time mentoring people, networking and meeting people. The AI can't do any of those things, right? It's not even on a trajectory to be competing with me along those dimensions. So I think I should be doing that. And so far it's gone well for me and I hope it goes well for the world.
Now, for young people, it's harder to say. I'm 62 and I don't need to plan for 40 years from now. If you're young, my advice would be to watch everything closely, keep an open mind, and don't think there's a single answer for everyone. There will be plenty of work. And if you're a human who can manage AIs, you will be ten or more times productive than what you ever had imagined. So be ready for that if you're someone who can do it. And why can't you do it? I don't see any intrinsic reason why most humans cannot manage AIs. I can see plenty of preference-based reasons why they may or may not wish to.
Mounk: On that interesting note, I want to jump to a very different topic. For decades, a lot of scientists and economists were worried about global overpopulation. Now it looks like we may be facing the opposite problem in the coming decades. We have a stagnation of the population in countries like the United States, a rapid decline in countries in Southern Europe, in Eastern Europe, in East Asia. Even relatively poor countries like India have now fallen to around replacement rate and are likely to fall down further. Even deeply religious societies like Iran are now well below replacement rate.
What's going on here?
Cowen: Well, the cynical but possibly true explanation is that having kids just isn't that fun. And getting married at age 31 is for many people, especially women, a better deal. You more or less know how things are going to go. But it's much, much harder to get four kids under your belt. I worry about this a lot. But the funny thing is we might end up with the worst of both worlds, the demand for energy, it seems that's just going to keep on going up even with shrinking population. And we could get fertility collapse at the same time—my goodness, that's a tough problem. We're going to need AI to help us solve it.
Mounk: So let's first of all explain why this is supposed to be a problem. I'm astounded by how many really smart, thoughtful people when I raise this topic with them, say, “Well, but that's a good thing, right? It's good for the population to go down. There's too many of us humans in the world, we’re using too many resources.” Why is this something that would pose a real challenge?
Cowen: Well, the first order cut is that there's simply less happiness, fewer people, fewer new ideas, less creativity. And furthermore, along the way, I think really pretty quickly, government budgets become unsustainable. So we've all mortgaged our future against growth and GDP. There's debts all over the place, and we've been relying on aggregate economic growth to pay those off. And if we're all South Korea, the world's in for the biggest financial crisis it's ever seen—probably within our lifetimes, not 200 years from now. So that's not sustainable. You can't just keep on having your population shrink. And the poorer you are, the harder it is to come up with subsidies for childbearing that would get you out of this trap. So there may be, like Peter Thiel's called it, a “point of no return.” We don't know where that point is, but it may not be that far away. Because these old people are not going to give up their Medicare and Social Security, and your budget is frozen. Maybe we ought to cut those things and pay a subsidy of $300,000 per kid, but that seems politically impossible.
Mounk: What's the response to people who cheer the idea of a falling population for environmental reasons, who say that we're already using too many resources and so therefore, if we have fewer rich people in particular in places like Korea and Italy and perhaps the United States using all of that CO2, that's something we should cheer?
Cowen: Well again, there's a one-off effect and an ongoing effect. If someone thinks what we really need is to get down to a world of five billion people and then stick with that as a steady state, I don't dismiss that. I'm not sure anyone has enough macro-environmental expertise to fully evaluate such claims, but they could be true. But again, the problem is you don't just stick to five billion people. It seems that it would keep on shrinking and then you're screwed. So it's a hard box to climb out of. Another nice scenario, which again is maybe one of the more likely ones, is that people fall in love again with the idea of having kids, and there's this radical cultural shift, and we get the fertility rate back up over 2.0 (replacement level). The U.S. was over 2.0 a decade ago. It's not that foreign a world to us.
Mounk: Next topic, science. How should we think about the rate of scientific progress at the moment? We've talked about some areas in which it has been really tremendous, whether that's AI, whether that's drones, whether that's robotics. There are other areas, including our biomedical research, where it feels like we're not progressing as fast as we might have imagined 50 or 30 years ago.
How bullish are you about the rate of progress of science at the moment, in general, and what can we do to speed it up?
Cowen: I’m bullish in two big areas, AI and biomedical research. I think biomedical research has done phenomenally well in the last five to six years. The COVID vaccine worked, we did it right away. I recall reading in April 2020 in the New York Times “experts” saying the best case scenario was a vaccine in three to four years. We have an anti-malaria vaccine—I get that delivery is an issue, but it seems to work pretty effectively. Malaria is one of the two biggest killers in human history. Sickle cell anemia it seems we will beat back. We're probably on the verge, or some people would say we have it already, of an HIV/AIDS vaccine that is not just managing the condition, but stopping it. And managing the condition works: 35 million people have died from HIV/AIDS by some estimates, and now you can have a normal life expectancy with the condition. So I think we've seen unbelievable progress recently. Immunology against cancer is working pretty well. I think in the next 30 to 40 years we're going to beat back almost everything except, possibly, brain deterioration. That will be the binding constraint: dementia, Alzheimer's, other brain conditions. I'm not saying we can't fix them, but the ways we would fix them give you, in essence, a new brain. That's the same as you being dead.
Mounk: So it seems like you have two beliefs that are in tension with each other, but which don't necessarily contradict each other. One of them is that actually the rate of scientific research and progress has been very good, at least in these areas. On the other hand, you really worry about the structure of science in universities.
Is academic science in crisis, and is that something we should worry about? Can the private sector compensate for it?
Cowen: I'm worried about academia getting worse. But I think in a few key areas, both science and academic contributions to that science have been getting better. But I would add there's a large number of areas—the most obvious is construction but that's far from the only one—where we're not making progress at all. So let's celebrate the huge progress in AI and biomedicine. Those are very important areas, and AI progress is likely to spread. But in so many areas we're still in this great stagnation. And academics haven't helped us either.
It's a very uneven set of advances. It's not like the 1920s, where more or less everything sped ahead.
Mounk: I know that a huge share of scientists say that the constraints of how they get funding really drives what research they do. It's very common to basically write grants for incremental progress you've already made in the past because that's really the best way of winning those grants, but that then locks you into doing further incremental research. It turns out that some of the federal funding agencies that were supposed to help fund ambitious work have both a bias towards more incremental, conservative work and, in the last years, seem to have had very political priorities as well.
If you were the U.S. government science czar, what three or four measures would you take to set scientists free to pursue more impactful research?
Cowen: Well, there's plenty of fixes. I feel they're all politically impossible. It depends what you allow me to do. But I think simply taking the current budgetary levels, keeping them or even increasing them, and just starting from scratch, de-bureaucratize everything, and treat it as if it's the first day—like the National Endowment for the Arts. Its first day was 1965. They actually made a lot of good decisions but overall they keep on getting worse and more bureaucratized, and they have higher staff and labor costs and are slower in all the rest. So we know how to do it. I'm not sure we have a way of doing it with checks and balances where you can disassemble and reassemble agencies while keeping their talent and human capital more or less on board. But again, it's not, as they say, rocket science, we just have to de-bureaucratize. And if need be, just set up new institutions: like “NIH-2.”
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Mounk: What exactly is the problem with bureaucracy? Is it just the share of the funding that goes towards people sitting around the NIH offices making decisions? Or is it the way in which the bureaucratic process then structures incentives?
Cowen: It's both, but the second is way larger as a problem. But it's both, of course. You eat up more of the money.
Mounk: This is a natural transition to something I wanted to ask you about, which is not just the incoming Trump administration and its likely economic policies, but in particular the DOGE element of it: How do you feel about the effort by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to reform the federal bureaucracy? And what advice would you give them?
Cowen: Well, I'm all for the DOGE effort. I mean, personally, I probably would get rid of, I don't know, two-thirds of all regulations, and I would bend downward sharply the trajectories on our government spending. But I fear they don't actually have a plan in place to do this. So you probably know that old book by Mo Fiorina, Congress: Keystone of the Washington Establishment. Congress is very, very important, and I don't sense the demand in Congress or from the voters to do this kind of thing. And the very legal standing of DOGE is quite up in the air. What are the incentives within DOGE? Everyone works unpaid? What are the chains of command? I don't know, I'm rooting for them, but it's not like a company, where things can go well. So I sure hope they get somewhere because if they totally fail, it will be a long time before anyone tries this again.
Mounk: In a way it's a test case for a larger theory, which is that there are these brilliant tech entrepreneurs who could improve the government. Now, I think that there are two simplistic views of that. One is from the “experts” in a lot of the mainstream who say, “Oh, Elon Musk is actually kind of an idiot and look at his silly tweets,” and so on. And I think that's just facile. It's very clear that Musk is extremely effective at very difficult endeavors. But the other is to say, “Well, in government, these people are just idiots and they don't know what they're doing. We, the brilliant outsiders, can come in and fix everything”—that I think really underplays the kinds of incentives and obstacles that make it really hard to fix the government. And of course there's an underlying difference in the risk tolerance that is appropriate to different endeavors: If you have startup capital to start a company and that goes badly wrong, well, you wasted the startup capital. If some core function of a government fails in a similar way, and you're not able to deliver basic services to people for a little while, they're not going to be similarly forgiving as some investors might be, and they shouldn't be similarly forgiving. So how should we think about the ability of the tech sector to make a difference in government?
Cowen: Well, not that many people involved in all this are stupid on either side. Maybe some at the Department of Education, but not in general. Milei has a good chance of succeeding in Argentina, but that's because they ran out of money. The New Zealand reforms of the late ‘80s and early ‘90s mostly succeeded because they had to. The United States today is not in that position, and we have greater checks and balances than most countries. So I'm just not sure what we can do. Maybe the advances in liberty will come at the federalistic level and through the states. We've seen a lot of that already in Florida, Texas, Idaho. Maybe DOGE will just get stuck. Again, I hope not, but I haven't yet seen the formula through which it can work. I'm sure there are a few things they can do. Get rid of the Consumer Protection Board, funded through the Fed. It's probably not constitutional to begin with. That'd be great, but that's like a tiny drop in the bucket, right? I'm not really sure how you can pare back the regulatory state. My advice to them would be to prioritize and figure out what is really important. Obviously, opinions on that will differ, but to just try to achieve a few of those priorities. For me, holding AI regulation off would be a priority. And on biomedical issues, deregulating our system of clinical trials would be a priority. But again, opinions on that will differ.
Mounk: What do you expect the Trump economic policy to be more broadly? Is he going to go through with very significant tariffs? How much of a risk would that be to the global economy? Do you expect some of the potential shakeup to be positive?
Cowen: I'm not sure I have special insight into this. I can look at the stock market and see the stock market does not believe the tariffs will be severe. I can look at Trump's earlier words dating back to the 1980s and I can see Trump truly believes his own talk about trade and tariffs, which would suggest something will happen.
When you're in serious doubt, sometimes you fall back on your core models. A core model I have of American government is that enduring change tends to come on a bipartisan basis, whether we like that or not. I do see a bipartisan consensus against China. So my inclination is to expect much heavier tariffs on China. Trump declares victory, gets some symbolic concessions from Canada, Mexico and other places. And that's what happens. But I don't know.
Mounk: Are heavier tariffs on China a good idea? What should America's economic policy posture towards China be?
Cowen: Adam Smith recognized long ago there's a national security argument for some tariffs. So if the U.S., say, puts a tariff on some drone components from China or elsewhere, so we develop our own domestic drone component industry, I'm for that in principle. But I understand at least some of the complications. So you put a tariff on components from China. Well, what if Chinese components get repackaged and sold through the Philippines, supposedly our ally? Do we put a tariff on the Philippines? How do we stop the Philippines producers from repackaging the Chinese components? Do we truly, totally try to go it alone and just have it be a fully American sector? Or do we rely, say, on South Korea, which is great at producing a lot of things we need, but is itself a vulnerable country? Those are very hard issues. I don't think there's any way to really get them right. I would say I favor some tariffs for national security reasons, but even there the case for them can be too easily overrated. And I'm not into just punishing China for the sake of punishing China.
Mounk: Let's ask the China question more broadly. Obviously, we should be delighted that the country has rapidly developed and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. At the same time, the fact that it can now rival the United States, not just in aggregate GDP, but in many areas of high technology and potentially in military might, is a potential national security threat.
What should our attitude towards China be and what should our hopes for China be?
Cowen: The main danger I see is that China tries to take Taiwan: either they succeed or, even if they don't succeed, the threat becomes very salient and vivid, and many more countries build or purchase nuclear weapons, and the world as a whole becomes much more dangerous—that to me should be what we're trying to stop. I don't know if we can stop it. And Taiwan is not a full cooperator in this by any means. But whatever we can do to strengthen the alliance with Taiwan and get Taiwan more ready and able to defend itself, to hold that off, and hope some kind of Chinese logic kicks in where every year they say, “Not this year, next year it will be better, easier, our military will be more ready”... and they say this for enough years and somehow the very option dribbles away and we're just in an entirely different situation. That's my hope. I think that's the game we have to play. And you play it in bits and pieces. There's not a grand master strategy you implement all at once. But that is how it could go well. I see a lot of scenarios where it doesn't go well.
Mounk: What is the future of the Chinese economy? The country has had tremendous economic development and clearly has very developed capacities in some sectors. At the same time, its overall GDP per capita remains $12,000 a year, according to the figure I just looked up, comparable to places like Mexico that aren't generally seen as incredible economic winners. And we've seen a relatively severe economic crisis in the last few years that the government in Beijing doesn't quite seem to have a plan for solving. Do you think this is going to turn out to be a temporary roadblock in the way that perhaps the Southeast Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s created a temporary halt to the economic rise of some of those countries, but didn't change their ultimate economic trajectory? Or could we be at the beginning of a more secular stagnation in the way that happened to the Japanese economy, which was seen as the clear future global winner, the clear rival to the United States, and has turned out to barely grow since its growth model first ran into serious trouble in the early 1990s?
Cowen: Maybe we'll get both of those. So maybe there's a future with one Chinese economy that includes 150 million people who are super dynamic. It has electric vehicles better than ours and DeepSeek in AI just put out a fantastic announcement. I have to read through the whole thing. But China has dynamic companies in a way that Japan fully lost and has not really gotten back yet. So I don't think simple stagnation is the story.
But to imagine China has this one very advanced part of the economy and then, say, a billion people who are like Mexico, economically speaking—that would to me be the most likely scenario.
Mounk: If you looked at Japan in 1992/1993, wouldn't you have said something similar? At that time, Japan still seemed to have these very, very dynamic companies like Toyota and other conglomerates, and it's only 20 or 30 years down the line that we can say that economic stagnation ended up taking them under, as well. Is there something about China's size that allows it to preserve dynamism in parts of its economy that wouldn't be the case even for a relatively large country like Japan?
Cowen: I think size and scale really matter. It's interesting you brought up Japan in 1992. That was the first time I went to Japan and I loved my visit, but I went by Sony headquarters to see all the “new” products and the most exciting thing they had was three-dimensional TV, which still has not really taken off. I didn't think they were doing great things in 1992. I thought Toyota cars were great. I owned one at the time, have bought many of them, and have always been happy with them. But that's it. And something like Sony now, I think they get most of their revenue from selling life insurance. So I think that Japan did not have innovative companies was evident by 1992. And you would not say that about China today.
Mounk: Why did South Korea overtake Japan? Is that a temporary phenomenon or is there some difference in the economic models that makes you expect that that divergence is going to continue?
Cowen: Well, that's basically a tie. I think Korea is ahead on a rounding error technicality. But there's a lot of similar forces going on in both places. The Japanese birth rate is 1.3. In South Korea, it's below 0.7 now, by far the lowest in the world. So if Korea cannot fix that, they will fall behind again. 1.3 in Japan's not great, but at least it's 1.3. It's twice that of Korea. So that's the key question there. I think Korea will stay even with Japan if they can keep an even birth rate. I think for assimilating immigrants, Korea has some advantages over Japan. Japanese as a written language is impossible to learn. Korean is much easier. But I think Japan in particular, which is known for turning on a dime historically, will have to ask itself whether they will not end up adopting Roman characters and changing some very basic features of how they communicate.
Mounk: Europe is a continent that did have significant economic dynamism in the post-war period—that was, once upon a time, at the forefront of important technologies, particularly in the case of Germany—but it now just seems to have given itself over to persistent morosity, in a very obvious way in Italy and Greece and so on. But the German economic model seems to have run aground as well. Is there any hope for Europe continuing to be a real economic motor or have they just missed the boat?
Cowen: I'll just predict more of the same. They've missed the boat, but they'll be okay. Their human capital's great. The culture, tourism, and systems of government work pretty well in most of those places. So I'm not mega pessimistic. But I don't see a scenario where it turns upward.
Mounk: How bad is that decline going to be for Europeans? Does it just mean that they become this kind of economic sideshow with stagnating living standards, but basically they can sustain a pretty pleasant life? Or is being French or German in 25 years going to be just significantly less pleasant than it is today?
Cowen: I think the former scenario, which is the status quo to be clear, right? It's not a prediction, that's a description. I don't see why they have to move backwards, and they can freeride on the tech advances from other places. And you see Novo Nordisk in Denmark, that's a fantastic European success. So maybe they can have some more of those. But still, if they can get their fertility rates into an okay place, I think it'll just hang on and be okay.
Mounk: What marks the difference between when economic stagnation allows you to sustain a living standard and when it really does turn into an acute problem? What are the determinants of that? How should we think about what Europe needs to do to at least make sure that it can still continue to offer its citizens a good quality of life, social services, and some amount of social safety net?
Cowen: Well, a big determinant is level of debt. So the Euro crisis, for all of its terrible features, did clear out a lot of the debt that was held. Now, Italy has been a debt bomb, but they're actually growing again because of the Draghi reforms. That looks less hopeless. Germany has kept debt, as you know, to a manageable level for a long time. France has become, finally, a problem. So that would be a vulnerable point, France. But they at least might have the potential to be more dynamic than some of the other economies. The Netherlands, I think, has produced some powerful companies and is doing great in agriculture, so I'm not pessimistic on them. And I think with Sweden, Denmark, again, you could be more optimistic maybe, especially with Sweden. So again, there are scenarios where they hang on and the debt problems remain contained. But if it all had Italian levels of debt it wouldn't work.
Mounk: Let's compare France and Germany for a moment. I've made the argument recently, but I'm slightly hesitant about it, that France has a real political problem. It also has a real problem with its level of debt per GDP. They run a big deficit. But there's also some relatively obvious things they could in theory do to fix that, including reform of the pension scheme and so on. It doesn't feel to me like the basic French economic model is in the process of collapsing. There are some long standing structural challenges, but actually France feels more dynamic to me than it did when I first lived there about 20 years ago.
Now, Germany seems to me like a very different case. That's a country that had a very well-working economic model, largely based on its car industry, on high-value manufacturing, as well as obviously a big service sector. But that depended on cheap energy from Russia, on exports around the world, particularly to China, and on a technological advantage that is now very much at risk, particularly but not only in the car sector. That feels like a kind of hinge point where you could imagine a much faster decline, or you could imagine them reconstituting the model and continuing to grow as they did in the past. But it feels like the variance of the outcome is much higher than in the French case.
Cowen: I agree. I would stress the point, which I think is quite familiar to you, that when things are quite dire for the Germans, they actually rise to the occasion more than you might expect. And this has happened numerous times in the past. So I don't see why they can't do it again and rebuild their economy along other lines. There's still something about the disciplined accumulation of human capital and social norms they're quite good at. It's a relatively attractive destination for talented migrants, as Europe goes. So I wouldn't bet against Germany, but I fully agree with your analysis, including on France. I've written as much. In Europe as a whole, if France and Germany muddle through and Italy doesn't explode, all things are going to work out.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Tyler further discuss the crisis facing Germany, Javier Milei’s reforms in Argentina, and how to think about money and financial ambition in one’s personal life. This discussion is reserved for paying members...
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