Kevin Hassett

And so the population growth is pretty low compared to what it was when we had tens of millions of people crossing the border.

And so the break-even jobs number for the payroll survey is, people think is down like quite a bit to maybe around 40 or 50,000.

Well, I was 40, 50, you were 30, 60.

I think we kind of were about the same range, right?

And so that's like another thing that we could have big increases in productivity and big increases in output and a healthy labor market with job numbers like the one that you forecasted.

And we'll see whether you're right or not.

I'm saying that... It's not 100.

That's enough to sort of keep up with the population.

You'd want stronger growth of that and unemployment to go down, but the unemployment rate's a little higher than what's probably the equilibrium unemployment rate in a full employment economy, but not a whole lot.

Let me talk about this, because there's an interesting anecdote that I don't think is ever made public about this.

So because computers were improving so quickly, then it was decided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, a lot of great professionals over there, that they needed to what we call hedonically adjust the computer price, which

meant that if you had a computer chip that was twice as fast as the one from last year, and it costs the same, then that's like a big reduction in the price of computing.

And so that in a typical year, right around when we were starting to have to make the judgment on this, the computer price was dropping at about like 16 to 20%.

at an annual rate and there was so much computer investment that real GDP was getting a real big kick from the fact that the deflator for computers was dropping so much.

So I was in charge of that part of the world for the staff.

I spoke a lot to Greenspan and he said to me once, how do they deflate communications equipment?

Because communications equipment is basically like computers now.

And went back and looked, and communications equipment, rather than dropping 15% or 20% a year, was going up like 2% or 3% a year.

And so then I called over, because they're actually very open about, like the technical people at BEA.

And I talked to them about, well, why is that?