James Manyika

In fact, some of the work we've been doing and other economists have been doing has actually been to look at this so-called declining labor share.

And I think a way to understand that declining labor share is to think about the fact that

If you were to set up a factory, say, 100 years ago, most of the inputs into how that factory worked were all labor inputs, so the labor share of economic activity is much higher.

But over time, if you're setting up a factory today, sure, you have labor input, but you also have a lot of capital input in terms of the equipment, the machinery, the robots, and so forth.

labor portion as a share of the inputs is being grained down steadily.

And that's just part of how our structure of our economy is changing.

So all of these effects are some of what is leading to some of the inequality that we see.

The structure of our global economy is changing, and I think it's now getting caught up also in geopolitics.

I'm not a geopolitical expert, but it's not lost from a global economy standpoint that, in fact, we now have and will have two very large economies, the United States and China.

China is a very large economy.

It's not just a source of exports or things that we buy from them, but it's also intertangled with, say, the U.S.

and other countries economically in terms of monetary and debt and lending and so forth.

But it's also a large economy in itself, which is going to have its own consumption.

So we now have for the first time

two very large global economies.

And so how that works in a geopolitical sense is one of the complications of the 21st century.

So I think that's an important issue.

Others who are more qualified to talk about geopolitics can delve into that one, but that's clearly in the mix as part of the challenges of the 21st century.

We also, of course, are going to have to think about the role of technology in our economies and our society.

partly because technology can be a force of massive productivity, growth, innovation, and good, and all of that.