Innovation Inheritance
City Journal Audio
Manhattan Institute
4.8 • 615 Ratings
🗓️ 22 November 2023
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
James Pethokoukis joins Jordan McGillis to discuss technology’s potential to transform our economy, the need to improve our education system, and the future of conservatism.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. |
| 0:17.7 | I'm Jordan McGillis, economics editor of City Journal. |
| 0:22.0 | Joining me on the show today is Jim Pethakukas. Jim is a senior fellow and the DeWitt |
| 0:27.1 | Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. He's a regular television presence on CNBC, |
| 0:33.3 | and he writes the Faster Please newsletter on Substack. Most pertinately for our conversation today, |
| 0:38.8 | Jim is the author of a recently released book, |
| 0:41.6 | The Conservative Futurist, How to Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. |
| 0:46.1 | Jim, thanks for joining me. |
| 0:47.6 | Jordan, thank you so much for having me on. |
| 0:51.3 | Now, Jim, I'm tempted to ask you when my hover pack will be out for delivery, but instead, |
| 0:56.9 | I'm going to go to the fundamentals of technological and economic progress, GPT. |
| 1:02.0 | For your listeners, I don't mean chat GPT, which stands for generative, pre-trained transformer. |
| 1:07.4 | I'm talking about general purpose technologies. Jim, what is a GPT and why do they matter? |
| 1:13.3 | Yeah, a general purpose technology is a technology that has a significant economic impact across a broad range of the economy throughout many sectors. |
| 1:29.0 | Sort of a classic case of a GPT would be, to go back a little bit, would be the steam engine, |
| 1:35.4 | would be sort of electrification, the internal combustion engine. |
| 1:39.2 | The computer, especially when combined with the Internet, is a general purpose technology and these are really important because when you look back through history economic growth and productivity growth the output per worker is fairly steady and then you get a general purpose technology or if you're lucky a cluster of |
| 2:03.3 | them and those can really accelerate growth and it's a hope of my book at least that we may be |
| 2:10.7 | seeing a cluster of important technologies right now you referenced the the first industrial revolution the steam engine. Do you think that that |
| 2:21.0 | phenomenon of industry taking off and then becoming globalized is essential for something to be |
| 2:27.0 | a GPT or was there anything prior to that like metallurgy or anything that predates |
| 2:32.0 | industrialization that would also be a GBT. |
... |
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