Ryan Avent
- Director of Portfolio Communications, Select Equity Group, L.P.
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Articles by Ryan Avent
Crowding out pits sovereigns against AI
Ryan Avent is a journalist, author of In Good Faith, and writes a newsletter called The Bellows.
Is now really the time to worry about a new China shock?
Ryan Avent is a journalist, author of In Good Faith, and writes a newsletter called The Bellows.
The US economy is running hot
Ryan Avent is a journalist, author of In Good Faith, and writes a newsletter called The Bellows.
The sting in the tail of Japan’s lost decades
Japan — long the epitome of chronic deflation, weak growth, and policy paralysis — has become a much livelier place.
What could go wrong
Ryan Avent is a journalist, author of In Good Faith, and writes a newsletter called The Bellows.
The death of secular stagnation
Ryan Avent is a journalist, author of In Good Faith, and writes a newsletter called The Bellows.
Artificial intelligence and Engels’ Pause
Ryan Avent is a journalist, author of In Good Faith, and writes a newsletter called The Bellows.
Ryan Avent on self-driving cars and the future of the labor market
Current time: 0:00 / Total time: -1:05:18 Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. Author Ryan Avent joins Tim to revisit a bet they made 16 years ago—and to ask whether the lessons of self-driving cars apply to modern AI. Back in 2010, Avent wagered that his newborn daughter would never need a driver’s license thanks to self-driving cars. Tim bet she would and ultimately won $500. But he was right for the wrong reasons.
La proxima Piketty
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Imagining the (Distant) Future of Work
Across two datasets—a corpus of 485 print media articles and a multi- actor survey of Tech/Innovation experts, Authors/Journalists, Economy/Labor Market experts, Policy Makers/Public Administrators, and Engaged Citizens (N=570)—we build the case that the future of work is a fiction, not a fact; or better yet, a series of competing fictions prescribing what the future will or should look like.
Inflation: Der richtige Kampf der Zentralbanken
Die Welt in 2023: Inflation: Der richtige Kampf der Zentralbanken Was lehrt die neuere Wirtschaftsgeschichte über die Chancen von Zentralbanken, 2023 die Inflation in den Griff zu bekommen? Nach einem Sprichwort aus ihren Kreisen können nur strenge „Falken“ in den Himmel für Zentralbanker kommen.
Suspension of belief
I have spent the past few weeks musing about bits of Brad DeLong’s new book (which I also reviewed here). I’ve done that because Brad is one of my favorite writers and thinkers, and because the book is very good. I strongly encourage you to buy and read and reflect on it, if you haven’t already done so.
The two twentieth centuries
Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia (my official review of which can be found here) is an economic history of what he calls the long twentieth century, stretching from 1870 to 2010. When most scholars go about slicing up modern history, they tend to see a clear break in 1914, and perhaps another around 1989-91, and from a political or ideological perspective one can certainly see why.
What is Trumpism, exactly?
A few years back, the mathematician and writer Cathy O’Neill cheekily noted that Trump the politician behaved an awful lot like a machine-learning algorithm. He doesn’t behave like he has any real beliefs, she observed; he more responds to incoming data as an algorithm might if it were a politician-bot tasked with soliciting strong reactions from a crowd.
Time to outgrow social media
You would think, in our era, that people would be quite comfortable with the idea that technologies which are valued by many people can also generate large social costs, such that we need to work, collectively, to use them less and/or more sensibly. That is the story of our fossil-fuel technologies, which provide us with a high-standard of living but which also contribute to public-health problems and climate change.
The end of the conservative age
Sometimes, a thing becomes visible only as it nears its end—or at least we may hope that the long, oppressive era of conservatism through which we have been living will soon breathe its last. The notion that ours has been a period of intense, almost universally held conservatism may seem odd to some readers, particularly those of a nominally conservative bent. Hasn’t the state grown as a share of the economy, for decades? Hasn’t the observance of traditional religion declined?
Does not compute
There are days when I think that the history of our era, whenever it is written, will say that we were a society with manageable problems until the internet came along and ruined everything. I’m not completely convinced of this; not yet. But there are days when I think it, and more of them all the time. I am not alone.
The trouble with supply-side progressivism
Ezra Klein has an essay at the Times this weekend which returns to a favorite theme of his: “supply-side progressivism”. The left, he has argued in a number of pieces over the past year or so, needs to embrace what Derek Thompson, of the Atlantic, has called an “abundance agenda”, which focuses on expanding the nation’s productive capacity and not simply on questions of distribution, sustainability and the like. I am very sympathetic to these arguments.
The inflation response that might have been
Recently, there has been a lot of online argument concerning problems in the American economy, why we have them, and what the Biden administration ought or ought not to say and do about them.
Consumption junction
In the 2010s, there was a long-running debate among nerds about how exactly the government should address the problem of chronically weak spending, which was holding back recovery and depressing both inflation and employment. Among the participants in this debate was a camp of monetary purists.
Globalization is not a politically antiseptic process
Does Russia’s invasion of Ukraine indicate that the world has entered a new era of great-power rivalry and, potentially, conflict? Vladimir Putin’s stunning decisions to attack Ukraine, and the apparent blessing that he received from a Chinese government that also has designs on its neighbors, initially felt like a deeply ominous thing.
Making economic policy as if democracy matters
I am not a military expert, and I am unable to judge just how well or badly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is going. From America, it certainly seems that the campaign began shambolically, and met resistance both fierce and effective.
Can we all just get along?
As a young man Keynes was a passionate liberal, and as an old man he helped design the institutions that would knit the global economy back together. In between, though, he found himself questioning the value of economic interdependence. In the face of Depression, he warmed to tariffs as an expedient means of reducing unemployment. But more broadly, he wondered whether the potential trouble caused by an intermingling of economic interests was worth the benefits of openness.
The end of two globalizations
It seems increasingly possible that the curtain is coming down on the great age of global economic integration which began in the decades following the second world war and then accelerated dramatically in the 1990s. It remains to be seen just how deep and long-lasting a retreat is on the cards.
The Fed looks increasingly determined to make a major policy error
Making monetary policy is hard, and I sympathize with officials at the Fed who have to make very difficult and very consequential decisions under extreme uncertainty. As someone with pretty dovish views on what policy ought to be now, I have to acknowledge that the Fed remained very patient in 2021 even as inflation rose well above its target and despite intense criticism from politicians, journalists and economists.
The Big Picture On Inflation
- (Thomas Lohnes /Pool Photo via AP) One last dispatch in 2021 Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments Related Articles
The big picture on inflation
Next year will mark 15 years since the first stirrings of the global financial crisis and also, as it happens, since I began writing for The Economist. I started on a freelance basis, writing for the economics blog, at a time when Freakonomics-style papers were all the rage and the stakes of the arguments seemed incredibly small.
Dire straits
A conversation that I have with some regularity these days begins when someone mentions China. One of us will bring it up, and we’ll both kind of let out a whistle as we mention all the things that seem...troubling about its current state and then we each shrug and, statistically, go buy stocks with tons of exposure to the Chinese economy.
On getting older
Caitlin Flanagan writes on how it feels to get older: Here’s what it feels like to turn 60: weird. On the one hand, you’re still going to the gym and to dinner parties. Sixty-year-olds still perform surgery on people who could choose other doctors. There’s no dithering yet—the senescence is almost undetectable. But on the other hand, you have been on this Earth for a really, really long time. I have a photograph of myself at age 3, standing on the docks of Cork Harbor, about to sail to New York.
Crypto: Is There Any There There?
(AP Photo/Salvador Melendez) Is crypto bad or good? Read Full Article » Show comments Hide Comments Related Articles
Crypto
Crypto has been around for a while now but it has, at long last, gone mainstream. A-list celebrities are hawking crypto stuff, crypto outfits are buying stadium naming rights, and you can bet good money there will be crypto ads running during the Super Bowl. It has thus become time, once again, to ask: is there anything to it, or is it all a huge scam? Will Wilkinson, who has been writing positive things about crypto, writes here that it is real and it’s spectacular.
Keep cool
I know, I know, I just said I wouldn’t write about inflation again for a while, but the discussion that’s unfolding online is driving me nuts. It seems to me that there’s a real lack of perspective and, often, a real disconnect between what people are arguing and what we think we know about how the economy works. A few points.
Best Business Books 2021: The pandemic rewrites geopolitics
In Shutdown, the best economics book of 2021, historian Adam Tooze looks back at a terrifying time and ahead to even greater challenges. Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World’s Economy by Adam Tooze (Viking, 2021) Crashed, Adam Tooze’s seminal 2018 history of the global financial crisis and its aftermath, ends with an air of foreboding. “Can we achieve perpetual stability and peace?” asks Tooze, a historian at Columbia University.
Revenge of the robots
Back in 2016 a book of mine came out, titled The Wealth of Humans. It’s kind of a funny little book, a bit all over the place, but its main idea is that the economy doesn’t really work the way we want it to when labor is abundant relative to other factors.
A Commonwealth of the Americas
Over the past few years, migration across America’s southern border has again become an extremely contentious political issue. Migration flows in the years prior to the pandemic mostly consisted of emigrants from Central America, fleeing the highest homicide rates in the world and an agricultural sector hit badly by a sustained, severe drought. But migration numbers have surged in 2021, and people are arriving from all over the Americas. It is not difficult to understand why flows have increased.
Disco Inferno?
On stagflation, and other risks
Disco inferno
I wrote about stagflation last week—specifically, whether we’re in for some—and I didn’t quite get in all the things I wanted to say, so I thought I’d put some additional thoughts here. The question on people’s minds is whether a surge in energy costs is likely to push us into a period of slow growth and high inflation like much of the world experienced in the 1970s. The piece I wrote says no, although that doesn’t mean that high energy costs won’t hurt.
What economists know about climate change
Back in 2019, Binyamin Appelbaum wrote a really excellent book called “The Economists' Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society”. In it, Appelbaum explains how economic ideas came to insinuate themselves into thinking about public policy over the past half century or so, often to quite detrimental effect. Whatever the policy question—whether there ought to be a military draft, for example, or how to regulate corporations—events tended to unfold in a fairly predictable way.
The China risk
Stocks are wobbling this week on concerns that financial troubles at Evergrande, a Chinese property developer, could lead to broader financial havoc. Evergrande owes a lot of money—about $300bn—and is often said to be too big to fail, so it’s understandable that markets which have been on an extraordinary tear this year might experience a little selling while waiting to see how this mess develops.
Two quick thoughts about Amazon
Amazon has been on a hiring binge right through the pandemic, for fairly obvious reasons. Globally, the Washington Post reports, Amazon payrolls have swelled by about 500,000 workers since the beginning of last year. That means it now employs about a million people, and it remains as eager to hire as ever; it is looking, for instance, to tack on another 125,000 or so workers in the months ahead.
Ryan Avent on The Wealth of Humans, Job Automation, and Globalization
Ryan Avent is a columnist at The Economist magazine, where he was previously a news editor, economics correspondent, and online economics editor. Ryan joins David on the podcast to discuss the rising economic angst in the United States and abroad and how sound macroeconomic policies might address this; as well as the ideas expressed in his book, The Wealth of Humans which explores the dramatic impact of the Digital Revolution on the economy and everyday life.
Mobs and justice
“A growing illiberalism, fueled by social media, is trampling democratic discourse,” reads the homepage tagline on a new essay in the Atlantic, by Anne Appelbaum.
That's rich
Sometimes when I’m paying my bills, I think about Engels’ pause. Phew, it feels good to finally say it. Now, let me explain why. The Engels in Engels’ pause is of course Friedrich Engels, who among other things chronicled the condition of the working class in England in a famous work, The Condition of the Working Class in England, at a time when the condition of the working class in England was not great.
On the monging of crises
I was born in 1978. I’m old enough to remember the Soviet Union, and my sense of the world was formed in the 1990s, at a time when liberal democracy and free-market capitalism were enjoying a moment of triumph. I didn’t believe the world was perfect, but I felt strongly that things would only get better over the course of my life. It’s been kind of a let-down, then, to see how things have actually unfolded.
Science and the stupid society
The last dispatch was a little long and difficult. But I think there’s something interesting there, so let me see if I can be a little more clear what I’m going on about. A few days back, there was a little flurry of conversation on Twitter about the idea that we should “believe in science” or “trust the experts”. There were a number of interesting points made by a number of people; rather than attempt to summarize them, let me direct you here and then you can click around as you like.
A growing problem
As the reality of climate change sets in, interest in the “degrowth” movement seems to be on the rise. The degrowth position, generally speaking, is that progress toward emissions goals isn’t happening fast enough, and that we (meaning people in richer countries) ought to be more open to sacrificing growth in economic output as part of the push to move humankind away from the climate precipice.
The stupid society
In a recent dispatch, I described how I’ve found the world less intelligible over the past year or so than in the past. I also said that I worried about an erosion in our capacity to communicate effectively with each other. I want to elaborate on that point just a bit. One might suppose that elaboration isn’t really needed. It’s not particularly difficult to see how problems with communication could negatively impact a society, after all.
Making the unthinkable thinkable
I’ve been on holiday these past two weeks. Catching up on the post-hols inbox is often no fun, but there are little treats along the way, like Adam Tooze’s Substack newsletter. I had to stop and reflect for a bit on this one, which considers why the Nazis lost the Second World War but which also lingers thoughtfully on the differences in economic strategies between Germany and the Soviet Union—and their consequences.
Was coal the low-hanging fruit?
It’s been ten years, remarkably, since Tyler Cowen published The Great Stagnation, a phenomenon of a Kindle Single which drew attention to, and sought to explain, a sustained slowdown in economic growth which began in the early 1970s. The book had a profound influence on my thinking. It moved me to write and publish my own Kindle Single in September of 2011: The Gated City, which examined how restrictions on urban growth harmed the economy by channelling people away from productive places.
[loud noises]
Over the past year or so, I’ve felt the world—the social world, people’s behavior, the Discourse, you all with your Tik Tokking and memes and such—to be increasingly unintelligible. It’s like there’s a book I’ve been reading, with some clear passages and some confusing ones, in which the text begins transforming into something runic and alien, completely boggling. To be more specific, I have the feeling that people’s actions are more frequently incomprehensible to me than used to be the case.
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