Arthur Kroeber

and they were doing it just not for one or two years, but for 20 years in a row, people will often say, well, there's all this waste and there's too much data on enterprises and they could grow much faster if they were just more efficient.

And it's like, really, could they?

They're already growing faster than anyone has grown before.

Is it really the case that,

that they could have grown a lot faster than they have.

And maybe, but I doubt it.

I doubt it.

And the reason is I think there's what I would call kind of an efficiency fallacy, which is that economists who, remember, have all been basically, all global economists, macroeconomists, have been trained in the United States.

You know, since the end of World War II and particularly since, you know, the 1990s.

Right.

And so they view sort of the U.S.

in its developed state as the norm.

Right.

rather than as the result of other processes.

So it's like the way we operate now is the way we got here.

And actually, that's not quite the case, right?

The reason China was able to grow so fast for so long was that they were able to mobilize these huge

swaths of resources, domestic savings, and throw them in a kind of uncoordinated way at a lot of problems.

And there was a lot of waste along the way.

That was part of the equation.