“China’s digging out of a crisis. But America’s luck is wearing thin.” — Ken Rogoff
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
Transcript preview
Preview only
Today, I'm speaking with Ken Rogoff, who is a professor at Harvard, author recently of Our Dollar, Your Problem, former chief economist at the IMF. Ken, thanks so much for coming on the podcast.
Thanks so much for having me, and welcome to Harvard, which is where we're filming this. In
your book, you have a lot of anecdotes of meeting different Chinese leaders, especially when you were chief economist at the IMF. And it seems like you had positive experiences. They would listen. You You met the premier with your family, and he would, like, listen to your advice. So, one, how does that inform your view about how competent their leadership is? And two, how do you think they got into this mess with their big stimulus or whatever else you think went wrong to the extent that when you were talking to them in the early two thousands, it seemed like, you know, you you were kinda see
Well, I wanna be careful to say they listen to everybody. I mean, the Chinese are way better than we are, of sort of hearing a 100 different views. Mine would be one of many, many, many, you know, that they heard. So I was very impressed by the competence of the Chinese leaders. So I actually gave a lecture in their party training school where if you're a mayor, you're a provincial governor, you're any bureaucrat on your way up, you go to this thing which for them is like Harvard Business School. They really looked for competence. So of course there were various loyalty things, but you meet th
the way, on that talk, so you mentioned in the book that before they gotta clear your talk, and so you gave them a sort of, like, watered down version of what you would say. I have to say that that that would take gusto to go up to the top party leaders. Were you nervous while you're giving the talk and you're like, oh, it's too centralized? And, I mean,
I was pretty experienced by that time, and, I frankly never use notes. So the idea I was gonna read my speech didn't come to me and maybe it was a little bit spontaneous. But, yeah, I mean, I think I certainly felt at that moment, you know, what am I here for? What's the point of coming to this? Why don't I talk about the elephant in the room? Everybody knows this. I don't know if everybody knew it, but it was clear to me. Yeah. And I I'm I'm gonna say it.
Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people in that situation usually, even though they should or the logic makes sense. But I think people often don't.
Yeah. I'm a professor. So people who had a big tech company or finance company or all these businesses, most of the other people, they can't afford to do that. I mean, they just, but as a professor, and I think they know that when they invite a professor, they can't cut your bill. They can stop you from going again. Right. They invited me again, by the way. Yeah. Although the time, I just talked to a tiny room instead of the big hall. But, yeah. No. I mean, I give credit to the Chinese for listening.
So you've said that the seeds of their current crisis were sown in 2010 with their big stimulus. But so is it wrong then to blame, Xi Jinping for this? It was, you know, before his time, near Hu Jintao that they did the stimulus that's causing all these problems now. Right?
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.