Speaker 1
You know, walmart is an incredibly well run operation, and continuously gets better. So there'sa, there's room for that kind of grow. Theres a, there's a book by a conomis i, tink is last i is vollrhath, called fully grown, where he argues that the great stagnation is just the natural end state for n economy that early on. So very early on, your agrarian, you start manufacturing. You eventually reach the limit where everybody has all the stuff that they really want, and more and more the growth is in services, and those are naturally hard to scale. But pting, the cont argument to that is, we don't really know those are hard to scale yet. We don't really know whether, you know, weather teaching scales, whether there is some kind of enough variance in teachers skill, such one teacher remotely teaching to 20 million people is actually better than a million teachers each teaching 20 people in a classroom. You know, if yo, if you make some assumptions that you can qualify teachers skill and that you can qualify the information loss of zoom versus in person, maybe you get to the point were you say, actually, we can replace a lot of teachers with a small number of super star teachers who do an incredible job. Or maybe we partiallywe replace some subsidive education with that. And then some of it remains not scalableand if you take out big chunks of a non scaleable business and turn them into a product that's continuously improving, then you do actually free up a lot of human time for other activities. You do execrate a lot of growth. Something similar might happen in health care. So, you know, a health carits, it's a very labor intensive job, like a if you're dealing with patients, you have to actually move them around. You don't roll them over in things like that. A and you can theres ther interesting, promising obesity treatment that could significantly reduce the a, the amount of chronic illness in country, and be just the physical effort required. And if you if you can slightly increase tus, five or ten %, the number of patients who could be served by a given number of hospital personnel, then you have just made the entire health care system that much more efficient. So i think that there's, there's an optimistic possibility that we will find these cases where something is less labor intensive than we thought, or there's a, there's a part of ithat can be made capital intensive instead of labor intensive. And then then we can move back to pessimism. So a one of the pessimistic cases is demographic, and that when people are having kids, that tends to drive a lot of consumption and tends to producea lot of demand. So, you know, they teyll want houses, they will want appliances, they'll want cars, they will buy a lot of stuff. When people get older, they tend to consume a lot less, and they tend to a lot of savings. T used to be that they would get older and spend down their savings, but actually, if you look at a data the fed does, i think the ew ork ved does a survey every three years, and they look at wealth by demographics. And a, it used to be that wealth piqued for people in their fifties, and i think ti fifties through sixties, and then declined that. But now there's, there's a cohort of those people who have basicaly no money, and theyave living on social security. But there's another cohort where they they own a house, they have retirement savings, and a, they are, they're earning money faster than they are spending it. And so they actually get more and more wealthy overtime. And if that happens, then you just have a big supply of capital and not a lot of demand for it. And and then you end up with a low real growth world with low interest rates and low inflation, but justnot not much is really happening. And since since that cohort is outbitding young families for housing ins a, it ends a delaying family formation. So it acully exasterbates the problem. So that and also those thost older demographics are way more likely to vote. So even though he baby fomers are not the biggest generation, and sexually, my generation the serted echo of the baby boo is a slightly bigger generation in numbers, but in terms of votes, baby rumors matter a whole lot more. So policyis going to weight their interests a bit higher. Anda, those interests are just, you know, less it their less growth oriented, more stability oriented. And a, so that's, that's probably how policyes, got a tilt.