Despite all its problems, the U.S. economy is actually outperforming its competitors, China and the European Union, two Opinion contributing writers argue in this episode. Natasha Sarin, an economist and law professor, and Dan Wang, an expert on China and manufacturing, are friends in addition to colleagues, and while they often disagree on America’s economic outlook, they reach the same conclusion: The United States remains in a stronger position than many people realize.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Natasha Sarin: Dan and I are friends and also colleagues, and we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the United States and our economy over the course of the last many years, and particularly, of recent, this narrative that the United States is in some substantial decline, much like the decline of the Roman Empire many moons ago.
Dan Wang: And last month, we had President Donald Trump organizing a big U.F.C. fight on the lawn of the White House, bringing to mind gladiatorial combat in the stadium.
Sarin: I think our answer to whether we’re witnessing a Roman Empire-type of decline is unequivocally no.
Wang: Wait, is it “unequivocally no” or is it “probably not?” And I should just say, now that we’re on this Roman theme, the Roman Empire, according to the historians, declined for like 200 years. So are we witnessing decline? It’s even hard to say. But I definitely agree with you that the United States is still looking pretty sharp among all of the major blocs in the world.
And so, what we should really try to do is to assess, within these three big blocs — the U.S., China, Europe — how is the U.S. doing? And I think that what we are really feeling right now is that the U.S. is sort of the cleanest shirt in the dirty laundry basket. Let’s think a little bit about what the big strengths and the weaknesses of the American economy are.
Sarin: I think it’s actually a very interesting set of questions, particularly for me, since I tend to focus a lot on what’s happening in the United States, and the nature of our domestic growth and our opportunities and potential.
And there, I feel like the U.S. is almost a tale of two cities, in that partly what is happening is that we are an economy with just tremendous strength — note that all of the leading A.I. labs are in the United States, training their models in the United States, contributing meaningfully, they hope, over the near term to productivity growth that’s going to be realized in the United States.
Also, SpaceX’s I.P.O., just a few weeks ago, made many multimillionaires here in the United States. So really remarkable and a lot of that remarkableness has to do with the fact that — Dan, you and I are both immigrants to the United States, and we are not alone in that. A very substantial number of Fortune 500 companies have been started in this country by immigrants and the children of immigrants.
And that’s because of something that sounds kind of cheesy, I guess, but is really deep and true about the nature of the American dream: I you want to innovate, if you want to build, if you’re an entrepreneur, you disproportionately are likely to want to come to this country to have access to a network that is interested in mobilizing those types of ideas and, frankly, dollars that are potentially going to be invested in your opportunities for upward growth. Not just for you, but for starting a company that is able to employ thousands or tens of thousands of people, like the Googles of the world, or like the Microns of the world.
A lot of those fundamental tenets, about what makes the American economy great and remarkable, I worry are under some attack. And you see that with attacks on skilled immigrants that are coming in this country at the moment. I’m a law professor. I think a lot about threats to the rule of law and to institutions, and what it means when foreign investors start to get a little bit nervous about whether they can truly trust that when a court in this country makes a ruling, with respect to an important business question, whether that ruling is going to ultimately be respected.
And I think all of those questions have always kind of just been assumed. The answer to them was yes. But I worry that the dysfunction — and the movement away from a nation that is really built on the rule of law to a nation that shifts, such that it is about deals and deal making with this administration — is one that has economic consequences that are really likely to reverberate.
Wang: A lot of it is pretty scary. And when I take a look at a lot of the parts of the economy that are not tech — that are not, let’s say, finance — there’s still quite a lot of dysfunction in a lot of these different places. My home is in the State of Michigan. Michigan has been a net loser in manufacturing over basically the last five decades, as the Detroit Big Three automakers have gone, steadily, away.
A lot of the automotive jobs have moved to different parts of the United States. Some of it has moved to Canada and Mexico. There’s a lot of manufacturing weakness. And what really struck me, with President Trump’s announcement of tariffs over Liberation Day last year, was how other countries were able to retaliate, especially China, by withholding key materials from the U.S.
And so, in the case of China, top leader Xi Jinping decided not to sell rare earths and magnets to the U.S. Automotive plants started shutting down, and this is when we started discovering that there are all of these critical vulnerabilities, not just with rare earths and magnets, but a lot of antibiotics are made in China, a lot of cardiovascular drugs are made in China. So is the U.S. a really strong economy if it is so dependent on other countries for a lot of these critical, big technologies?
I want to ask you a little bit more about what worries you most about the economy. Not just the broader issues of rule of law — not just the broader issues of erosion of democracy — but the economy as it is. How is our fiscal capacity doing, and how is the U.S. able to maneuver through all of these issues around debt and deficits?
Sarin: Let’s define some of the issues maybe to start. If you think about the deficits that the U.S. government runs, what that essentially means is that we spend more each year than we are bringing in. That’s both because we’re spending a fair amount — and by the way, that spending is going to go up over the course of the next many years, somewhat mechanically, as our population ages and, for example, we’re paying out more beneficiaries of Social Security.
On the flip side, the United States is an incredibly low-tax country. We are No. 32 out of 38 O.E.C.D. countries, with respect to how much revenue we bring in every year for the country through tax collection. And so, what you have is a delta between what we spend and what we bring in, and that difference is growing pretty sizably over time. Right now, it’s something like 6 percent of G.D.P. It is going to increase over the next decade to something like 8 percent or 9 percent.
Wang: And that’s over a trillion dollars already right now, right? So our deficit every year, the amount that’s going up to debt, is going to rise higher and higher.
Sarin: Yeah. And sometimes people say — as they’re trying to make the case for why we need to be more fiscally responsible — things like: “No parent would let their child run these sorts of credit card bills.”
They would say it’s OK that they’re spending so much more than their allowance if they’re young or than they’re making as young adults. That’s not exactly the right way to think about it from the perspective of the U.S. government, of course. Because we print our own currency. So we print the dollars that we’re spending. And so, you might think, “Well, so why should I care?”
Wang: What’s there to worry about?
Sarin: Like, “trillions of dollars here, trillions of dollars here, who really cares? And can’t we just print more money?” And there’s those funny memes I’m sure you’ve seen, like, “Money printer go brr.” So that’s this genre of argument.
And I’ve never been that sympathetic with this genre of argument, in part because we know that there are really substantial costs for the economy associated with running really large deficits. One of the costs is that it turns out that you spend a lot of your dollars on servicing your existing debt. What’s also true, when you’re running really high deficits, is that you’re in a situation where that type of expenditure leads to higher interest rates. Because it means that there’s more debt outstanding for the U.S. government, so our borrowers are going to say: “Well, I’m going to charge you more, maybe because I’m less certain that you’re going to pay me back, or just maybe because the existing amount of debt that we have outstanding is quite significant.”
And that means higher interest rates, not just for the U.S. government, but also for all of us as we’re looking to buy houses or buy cars. So I worry that these costs are pretty significant, and that’s even outside of the idea that we get into some sort of crisis, where we’re dragging down our economy’s capacity as a result of the checks that we’ve already paid out and that we’re having trouble financing.
We started this conversation with the question of: Where are we in the United States vis-à-vis other countries, and potentially vis-à-vis our own economic decline? You are a China expert who’s spent the last few weeks actually in the country. And I’m curious, having been there, having spent time there, what’s the view on the ground? And particularly, how competitive does it feel like to you vis-à-vis the United States?
Wang: Maybe the United States is not facing a Roman-style decline, but the Chinese have their own form of decline. So it’s my first time back, essentially, in three years. I used to live, for six years, in China between Hong Kong, Beijing and Shanghai. And what I was really struck by, being in China right now, is how wonderful and livable a lot of the cities are.
The city of Shanghai grows ever better. It was partially built by the French. It’s full of these leafy boulevards, and it’s become a quieter city since I’ve lived there. All of the cars are honking a little bit less, all of the fleet has been electrified, and the coffees are getting increasingly amazing.
So 20 years ago, there were not that many Starbucks in China, but now you have all of these amazing coffee creations. At the same time, I also saw that China’s economy is remarkably weak in many, many ways: The property bubble has burst; youth unemployment is really high. Even though Shanghai is a really amazing city, people aren’t really having kids.
And so, the startling contrast that I feel in China right now is that people are living in this serene discontent, in which their lives are pretty good. If you’re a young person, you can expect really amazing bowls of noodles that are really cheap, you can charge your electric vehicle in a pretty cheap way. There’s all sorts of beautiful things that you get to see. Yet people are kind of discontented, because there’s all of these problems with the Chinese economy right now, and people don’t necessarily have a tremendous amount of hope for the future. And that is always what I’m trying to grapple with in China now.
Sarin: One of the things I think about — based a lot on your work, Dan — about China is its capacity to build. And I think about that sort of dynamism a lot, as we’re thinking about this artificial intelligence revolution, and the ways in which China is playing an incredibly prominent role.
And I wonder if you can actually see that in some sense in China presently, as you’re walking around or as you’re having conversations with people. Does it feel like the economy is dynamic and evolving in ways that are kind of revolutionary as a result of artificial intelligence?
Wang: There’s all sorts of ways in which China still feels like it is building the future. So the subway lines are still expanding in a lot of cities. The air pollution has dropped pretty substantially. Every one in two cars sold in China is electric, and it’s much closer than the one in 10 cars sold in the U.S. There’s more robots on the roads, too. There’s people nervous and excited about A.I. as well.
There’s been a new phenomenon, in the U.S., called Chinamaxxing. Have you heard of this?
Sarin: No. What is Chinamaxxing?
Wang: “Maxxing” is mostly a social media phantasm, but a lot of people have been looking at these videos of the skyline of Shanghai or the skyline of Chongqing, which is really amazing — there’s these drone shows out there. And people are feeling like, “Oh, you know, you’re meeting me at a very Chinese time of my life.” You’re drinking tea more. You’re wearing slippers inside the house. People are playing mahjong more. Maybe your students —
Sarin: Not just my students. My mother is obsessed with mahjong. They have a club. They play every week.
Wang: I’ll play with her.
Sarin: She’s Chinamaxxing is what you’re saying.
Wang: She’s Chinamaxxing, too. And it’s attracting some more people, including young people, who feel like they haven’t been able to see China for quite a while. And more people, more Americans, are starting to visit China and have a good time there.
Sarin: It’s not just China. You’re seeing American citizens sort of moving abroad in record numbers.
I have conversations all the time with people who are thinking about whether or not they can get citizenship in other countries. Maybe that’s a result of the ways in which they’re viewing our political dysfunction and wanting some sort of alternative. I feel like that is kind of at the forefront of at least parts of the American ethos at the moment, and I wonder what’s driving that.
Wang: This is the contradiction with the U.S. We can take a look at this situation with the U.S. inequality — how narrow the cone of growth is with data center spending and quite a lot of tech — and we can see all of these problems on the horizon. What is going to happen with rule of law? What is going to happen with demographics? What is going to happen with our research universities and everything else?
My feeling is still that, when I’m in the U.S., this country has all of these amazing advantages that other regions don’t. And I think it is often immigrants who are able to see America the most clearly. Some people who are, let’s say, on the right side of the political spectrum don’t really want to acknowledge any issues with the United States. And then, sometimes people on the left side of the political spectrum can only acknowledge the problems and all of the many terrible things, let’s say, that are very real and valid that the United States has not yet corrected.
And so, when I’m walking around in Europe — and I spend quite a lot of time there — one of the things I’m telling the Europeans is that I think that Europe is amazing in all sorts of ways. I was just in Switzerland, there’s amazing croissants, all sorts of really good things.
But what Europe doesn’t seem like it has, relative to the United States, is deep capital markets that are really able to muster enough capital to bet the farm on transformative new technologies.
Sarin: Why do capital markets matter, relative to croissants?
Wang: Well, the croissants matter quite a lot as well, but the capital markets also do.
When we have a lot of savings, when we have these really big important technologies — whether these were, let’s say, semiconductors in the past, or telecommunications equipment, or A.I., or name your pick of really big, new sources of growth, not the five-century-old croissants — we need to be able to muster enough effort really to try to make these a reality and to try to spread these benefits, and control their risks and really try to push forward our standards of living. And the Europeans haven’t really been able to do quite a lot of that. They’re mostly buyers of American technologies.
They’re not really able to produce a lot of these leading new technologies. It really is true that they’re much, much more regulated, so they have to spend a lot more time focused on regulatory reviews and license approvals. And the other big thing that Europe doesn’t have is elites that are able to renew themselves through immigration.
And Europe certainly has had a lot of refugees show up at its doorstep, and these people have been able to integrate somewhat into the European economy, but not really into the ranks of the elites — and not without triggering some sort of a broader backlash among the native-born in, let’s say, France and Germany, where the right-populist parties are outpolling the incumbent parties now.
And so, when we are taking a look at the American economy, what we’re seeing is that the U.S. dollar is still really important. Plenty of people still want to buy American debt, which is able to fund some of our deficits and allow us to do all the things that we want to do. And it’s not really clear to me that in spite of America’s problems, people are really moving all of their assets out of the U.S. to, let’s say, buy German bonds instead.
So Europe is not necessarily doing super well. Europe’s share of American G.D.P. has been kind of stuck at around 70 percent of America’s levels for quite a long time.
Sarin: It didn’t recover as well from the pandemic, right?
Wang: There’s all sorts of ways in which Europe cannot recover very well. It cannot pursue new opportunities, and they can’t even fix air conditioning. They can’t even get the air conditioning in France when it’s so hot.
Sarin: Is that a cultural thing, or is that a wealth thing?
Wang: I think a lot of this is that Europeans have this self-conception that they know how to deal with heat. You know, the Italians know that they keep out of the sun in the afternoon and they air it out in the morning.
Sarin: I do not know how to deal with heat and I’m Indian, so I guess I should, but I do not.
Wang: My personal interest in this is that my mother-in-law lives in Austria. She’s Austrian, and in order for her to get an air conditioning unit in her building, you need to have unanimous approval from all of the other Austrian residents inside the building.
And when are you going to get a bunch —
Sarin: We have versions of that with our co-op boards and all that. It’s just that air conditioning is normalized in a way that everyone has it.
Wang: Well, maybe New York City co-op boards are America’s answer to European stagnation.
Sarin: I have long said, about the United States — and part of the reason why you’ve seen all of this, over the course of the last two years, you’ve seen us initiate trade wars that have driven up the effective tariff rate to levels we haven’t seen in this country for almost a century.
You’ve seen us start conflicts, seizing the president of another sovereign nation or in Venezuela, or this conflict that we’re seeing in Iran, where the nature of the United States as a stable hand in the world — and kind of a trusted ally — has really disintegrated pretty meaningfully. And yet, you haven’t actually seen much impact on a lot of indicators of how much other countries, and frankly investors, trust the United States, right? Dollars are still flowing into this economy. The stock market is booming. We’re in a situation where it’s relatively easy to find people to finance our very large stock of both public debt from the government and private debt that’s coming from a lot of these booming A.I. companies.
And so, why is that? And I think part of the explanation is a little bit what you’re describing: Like, where else are the dollars to go? They’re not going to go to China, where foreign investment has basically fallen off as a result of real concerns about the rule of law, about the tendency of an authoritarian government to inflate the economic picture that it presents the world.
And frankly, they’re not going to go to Europe, because it has its own type of dysfunction, its own problems with respect to its debt, which are more significant in meaningful ways than the United States’.
Wang: Yes. And this is the really striking thing — when I was just in China over the past month, taking a look at the heavy hand of the government in trying to control a lot of elements of society and the economy, I’m still seeing so many of these shock tactics that the government has done that have really hurt the confidence of a lot of people.
So, Natasha, when you bring up some of the issues with the transactionalism of the Trump administration, I’m still thinking that, well, the only thing worse than transactionalism is running roughshod through the lives of the people, with things like the “zero Covid” policy, which has still traumatized a big city like Shanghai, in which something like 25 million people were unable to leave their home for roughly 10 weeks in the spring of 2022.
Xi Jinping has also triggered a really big property correction. So the Communist Party has decided that property values are too high in China, and so they try to prick this bubble. It ruined a lot of developers. And property prices have fallen by roughly one third since their peak about five years ago.
And when so many Chinese households have most of their savings in the property market, and the value of that falls by one-third, people are really feeling a lot poorer. And when I’m taking a look at China, I see all of these amazing products. Yes, much better electric vehicles — much better, much cheaper. I spend a lot of time talking about how much Chinese developers, as well as the Chinese state, have built energy in China. So last year, China built 300 gigawatts of solar power. What that really translates to is that when a Chinese consumer charges their electric vehicle to a full range, it costs them on the order of about 13 dollars, essentially, to have a full tank of gas.
And that’s what enormous amounts of energy investments really mean. So they’re getting better electric vehicles, they’re getting better coffees. They’re even getting better croissants, which I have enjoyed in Shanghai as well. But what you’re also seeing is kind of a skittish consumer that isn’t really able to spend.
They have all of these big uncertainties about the value of their investments. The Chinese stock market has not boomed as much. The Chinese A.I. labs — which are kind of the only peers in the world relative to the American labs — they’re able to deploy about 10 percent, roughly, of the capital of the American A.I. labs, in part because of American export controls, in part because the environment is a little bit more uncertain over there.
And what’s really striking to me, with China right now, is how few people are having kids. So, according to the official statistics in China, China’s total fertility rate is about 1.0. So an average number of children that a family can expect to have is one. By comparison, in the U.S., it’s roughly 1.6, 1.7.
Sarin: Also declining, pretty substantially, but not nearly as substantially as China.
Wang: Not nearly as substantially as China. And you know what China also doesn’t have? Many immigrants. There’s this Irish writer, his name’s Sam Enright, who put out this really astonishing calculation to me, that the country of Ireland — a country of six million people — has about just as many immigrants as the People’s Republic of China, 1.4 billion.
Both of them have about one million foreign-born people.So, you know, there’s all sorts of ways in which —
Sarin: Can you connect that to the autocracy and to “zero Covid,” and to the skittishness of the consumer? Do you think those are drivers to why people aren’t immigrating to China? I mean, you said that we’re all Chinamaxxing, so why aren’t people immigrating there? But also, why aren’t dollars flowing there?
Because a real worry that I have is: We made a lot of choices, in the ’90s, to open the world, to have China join the World Trade Organization, and the hope was that China would look more like the United States at this moment in time. And what I worry we’ve seen in recent years is that the United States is starting to look more like China. And in that world, I should be worried, in the future, about exactly what you’re describing coming to the U.S. I should be worried about the skittishness of our consumers and the lack of foreign investment and the lack of immigrants — and you’re already starting to see, anecdotal evidence at least, that some of that is happening.
Wang: One of these exercises I did recently was I pulled out the list of statements that President Trump has made about President Xi, and President Trump said that President Xi is brilliant, so smart, comes almost out of “central casting.” I have a hard time parsing what that last bit means. It’s as if Xi Jinping is as handsome as Tom Cruise or something.
But I think what is really scary is that Trump is also emulating Xi in maybe taking an equity stake in a company here and there.
Sarin: It’s moving in the direction of state-based capitalism, right? That’s kind of the description of the plan. That was the description with Intel. That’s the description of a lot of — if you listen to what David Sacks is saying about some of these A.I. labs and the idea that the government should take an equity stake in them — that is quite similar to the Chinese model in ways that I feel like are pretty concerning.
Wang: State capitalism with American characteristics, in which the White House as well as the Department of Defense, have already taken equity stakes in companies like Intel, like MP Materials, and that is very, very real.
And so, when I’m thinking through some of these issues, I think that it’s definitely the case that we have a lot to worry about; that the Trump administration, in a lot of ways, seems very intent on throwing away a lot of America’s best advantages. How can it possibly be a bad thing that so many of the world’s most ambitious people want to move to the United States and build their families and build their companies right here?
Why should we possibly drive some of them into the arms of China? Because there are so many of these A.I. researchers that are of Chinese descent, that have attended Chinese universities, that are Chinese nationals, and isn’t it better that all of these amazing A.I. researchers are creating companies in Silicon Valley, rather than in Beijing or Shenzhen or Shanghai?
But I think the autocracy of China is still kind of a limiting factor for how far China can go. There are all sorts of problems with demography, with the political system there. Next year, Xi Jinping is going to give himself another five-year term at the 21st Party Congress. He’ll be in charge for almost 20 years. And at that point, Xi Jinping is still kind of a young man. In 10 more years, he’ll be old enough to run for U.S. president. So, you know, there’s all sorts of ways in which Xi is aging. I think it’s going to be self-destructive.
And when you take a look at all of these economic issues — confidence issues, demographic issues — China seems to me to be losing its position. But I think when investors — with whom you and I speak to on a pretty regular basis — when they’re taking a look at everywhere else, it doesn’t really seem like any other major bloc is going to be a really amazing challenge to the United States.
Sarin: It’s both like this great blessing, right? If you think about the 20-year trajectory of countries in Europe that we’ve been talking about, of China, we haven’t talked that much about India, but India as well. If you compare the U.S. trajectory to the rest of the world, you should be feeling, on a host of dimensions, pretty good about where the U.S. sits — particularly with respect to its ability to harvest the potential for deep increases in productivity and economic growth that are coming on the heels of artificial intelligence.
That, to be clear, is going to create a whole host of problems, potentially, right? Because if Dario Amodei, who runs Anthropic, is right —
Wang: With the unemployment rate shooting up to 20 percent is what he said.
Sarin: Even if that is a massive exaggeration, getting an unemployment rate that’s at 10 percent, and massive displacement of white-collar work, is a big deal and a big economic problem that this country is going to have to confront, at a time when it already has a ton of debt outstanding and needs to figure out how to make new investments.
But it still feels like what you’re describing is — and I think this is my view, too — that the U.S. is best positioned to harness the potential of the next decade, or two decades, relative to anyone else across the globe. But I worry that that’s like a blessing and a curse, in that best positioning actually discourages us from doing a lot about really deep problems that we have — problems about government spending and deficits that we’re running, but also, frankly, about problems about increasing inequality, and the fact that we’re in a country where a lot of people feel like they are being left behind in ways that are showing up in our political outcomes and our discourse, but also in ways that are showing up in the day-to-day lives of people, particularly in the last few months, when they’ve watched their wages and wage growth be fully eaten away by increases in energy prices associated with this war.
Wang: Complacency is always really bad, and implosion is always an option. There’s all sorts of ways in which people are very nervous about the remaining two and a half years of the Trump administration. And I think the really scary thing is that confidence is something that’s pretty easy to break.
And nobody ever expects a financial crisis in exactly the same shape that they emerge in. And when these financial crises come, they come lightning fast and catch everyone off guard. So it’s never OK to be complacent. But it’s still, I think, OK to celebrate what the United States has right now, and not really be too fearful yet that the Europeans are going to solve their growth problems. These people can’t even install air conditioning.
And I think that we’re also not going to expect the Chinese to solve their problems. Is China going to transform into a political system that is able to work out political succession very easily? Are they going to be able to instill confidence in their entrepreneurs, who have been deeply shell-shocked by everything that the Communist Party has done in the last couple of years? If the international investors are not spending too much of their time thinking about the growth and dynamism of the U.S., I don’t think that they’re all going to pivot to thinking about China instead.
Sarin: I agree with you. I think we should celebrate. And it’s our 250th anniversary, so full cause to celebrate the remarkableness of the American economy. But I do think it took 250 years to build a system where investors trust and want to hold the dollar as the safe asset of the world, and believe in our institutional strength and believe that when a commitment is made by our government to pay back its debt, that commitment will be met. I just worry it takes a lot less time to squander all of that remarkable potential, and that you might very well see — to your point, crises happen slowly and then all at once.
And so, I think that the tendency is in the direction. If you watch and witness not just policymakers, but industry leaders talking about growth in the United States, the potential of the United States — talking about these three mega-I.P.O.s, including SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropic that are on the horizon — there’s a lot of rah-rah about the potential and the growth and the capacity that our economy has.
And I just think that there are real threats on the horizon that it doesn’t particularly feel like our system is super well equipped to navigate. And, by the way, you said this, two and a half years are left of the second Trump administration; it’s very likely that those two and a half years are going to coincide with massive technological change, movement towards things like artificial general intelligence, where it then becomes hard, actually, to think about what the regulatory framework is that you put on this technology, since it’s so advanced relative to the systems that we even have today.
And I don’t know, it doesn’t feel like our political system is sort of super well equipped to navigate that.
Wang: We started the conversation by speculating about whether the U.S. is in imperial-Roman decline, and I think the answer that we are settling on is probably not. So what are you thinking about on the 250th of the anniversary?
Sarin: I am thinking about the fact that only in America could I go to Dunkin’ Donuts and get an actual bucket of iced coffee, and what a remarkable place we are.
Wang: Did you just say a bucket of iced coffee?
Sarin: Nothing could be more quintessentially American than that.
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