Stephen Kotkin

So you're not inventing market behavior from scratch.

You're surfacing it in some ways.

And so party officials and industrial officials

They have market behavior in their firms to grease the system and to meet their output.

Fair point, DK, fair point.

We often exaggerate the role of policy in all realms.

Because we do policy ourselves or we talk to policymakers, we have a bias towards the causality of policy.

So America is 25% of the global economy since 1880.

We've had no income tax.

We've had income tax.

We've had high income tax.

We've had low income tax.

We've had tariffs.

We've had fewer tariffs.

We've had all sorts of regulations.

We've had deregulation.

For 150 years, more or less, we've been around 25% of global GDP, which is 5% of the population, through every imaginable variety of policy regime.

That doesn't mean that policy is inconsequential.

It matters for a lot of players in the system.

It matters for those who get the policy turned in their direction, the subsidies or the tax breaks or the taxes on their competitors or whatever it might be.