Dwarkesh Hirani

Yeah, exactly.

And it's all financed, as you say, with this financial repression, which is basically a tax on savers.

And so even though there's no meaningful income tax and just value-added tax and corporate income tax, if you factor in the currency devaluation, which is a tax on consumers, and then this financial repression, which is a tax on savers, it actually might be a meaningful tax.

decrease in the quality of life of an average person.

And then just to close the loop on this, so –

I think sometimes we get impressed when we see, oh, they've got the Made in China 2025 and the NDRC and the MIIT and so forth have these...

very specific, you know, LIDAR needs to get to this point and we need the EUV machines at this point and so forth.

But your claim is that that part of the system is actually dysfunctional.

And in fact, the part that actually works is the 5% that is totally private.

Going back to the local government debt burden, there's a world where AI isn't a big deal and there's a world where AI is a big deal.

If we live in the world where AI truly causes huge uplift to economic growth and so forth, is it possible that this problem doesn't meaningfully harm China's ability to compete at the frontier?

And here's why that might be the case.

It seems like this problem is especially affecting poorer provinces, whereas you have the actual numbers, but are Shanghai and Guangdong in a good position with respect to their fiscal situation?

And could they keep funding

top-end semiconductors, AI firms, data centers.

And so China could still keep competing at the frontier in AI, even if the poorer provinces don't have the money to fund basic services and so forth.

And in the long run, they get advanced AIs, and that's a big uplift to economic growth.

And they can just grow their way out of this debt problem.

And what would a solution at this point look like?

Because if you've already spent all this money –