Dwarkesh Hirani

supply-demand, here's why certain regulations can be bad, here's why tariffs are bad.

Just the basic 101 teaches you that.

So if a lot of the members at the highest levels of the Communist Party have this basic understanding, then what's the reason that they make mistakes that many economists say they shouldn't do?

Like, why...

Obviously, people talk about rebalancing a lot.

Why don't they think that increasing consumption is a good idea?

At some point, we'll talk about leading small groups and the way they work.

But the picture you get from the fact that

Xi is monitoring what all these different Politburo members are doing.

He's noticing whether they're dragging their feet.

He's leading all these small teams.

You'll explain this in a second, how these work.

But they organize different leaders who are the heads of the ministries or commissions that are relevant to a specific project working.

And I guess every week they meet and they hammer out who's a bottleneck, what do we need to do to get a project moving.

So Xi has ratcheted up the amount of such meetings that – and he's – the picture you get is somebody who is micromanaging details across all these policy areas.

If you read Stalin biographies, there's a big thing.

Like Stalin actually was a person like this, obviously not to great effect.

But he was interested in micromanaging every single detail across even the theater productions in the country to like steel production, everything.

Is that who Xi is?

So the study sessions with the Politburo, these meetings, etc.