Noah Smith

speaker

437 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 24 Jul

Noah Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Prof G Markets · America’s Economy Is Entering a New Era — ft. Noah Smith · 24 Jul 2026 podcast

So if you don't want your sovereign wealth fund to do that,

then you don't have to have it do that.

It's really easy to not have it do that.

In fact, the sovereign wealth fund proposals that I've heard involve explicitly buying the index.

So I think that ad hoc stakes in companies like OpenAI are dangerous for this reason, but then you can easily solve that just by buying the index.

So if you look at the labor share of income,

it's going down, it's going down by any reasonable measure.

And so if you buy, um, a very broad index of stocks, all you're doing is buying the capital, some of the capital share of income and, and, and then redistributing it.

So you're doing that.

So, so that fear, I think of, of picking winners and losers.

I also think that, that picking winners is actually has a much better track record than people think.

I think that the idea that this always picking winners always fails, um,

It doesn't.

It has some pretty predictable failure modes that we see a lot, sure.

But it's not like the simple, easy nostrum of, oh, picking winners always fails, guys.

If I can label something picking winners, then it's something we shouldn't do.

That's been proven wrong again and again.

But...

That said, we don't have to pick winners with a sovereign wealth fund.

We can just buy the index.

Showing 201–220 of 437 · page 11 of 22