Episode Details

Thank you Quentin Hardy, Beth Arnold, Jane Trombley, Resistance Media, Victoria Priya, and many others for tuning into my live video with Heather Cox Richardson! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Transcript

HCR: Hey, everybody here from Bonita Springs, Florida and Elgin, Illinois and Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington, Fairbanks, Alaska. Boy, it must be getting beautiful up there right now. Newfoundland, Canada, Oak Park, Illinois. Still, we do not have a duplicate Plano, Texas. Then we got I think we got Oak Park, Illinois. That’s two Illinois.

We got Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, Vienna, Austria. Where is our Facebook? from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Dublin, Ohio. And Kristen is here from Facebook. So welcome, everybody. And here, Dr. Krugman and I go again with Lunch Money. Hey, Paul, how are you?

PK: Hi, I’m good. How are you?

HCR: I’m good. We have spring here, finally, which is unbelievable.

PK: We’re hitting 86 this afternoon in New York.

HCR: Oh, I can be there in about three hours. We’re not going to be 60.

PK: So yeah, here from beautiful New York City, actually more or less across the street from the Empire State Building. This is my academic office.

HCR: Oh, that’s nice. That’s nice. I’m just across from trees. Listen, so the world is changing so quickly that it’s kind of hard to get your mind around it. And one of the things that jumped out to me this week was the degree to which we’re focusing on the loss of soft power. We’re looking at the loss of you know, the idea of American military dominance. That’s another question. But I’m really interested in what it means for the U.S. economy to have taken such a dramatic turn away from dominance around the world.

And what got me thinking was I did an interview the other day with Vanessa Williamson of the Brookings Institution about taxes, right? And she really offhandedly said, well, you know, we have this thing in economics called the resource curse, where if you have a country that has a reliance on an easily accessible resource like gold or oil or whatever, it means that they don’t really the leaders don’t really have to pay any attention to the people, because they can just dig it out of the ground.

And she said, I’ve always kind of thought that maybe America’s resource curse was the fact that we were the world’s reserve currency. So we could borrow as much money as we wanted at really low prices. But that’s changing. And she just kind of threw it out there. And I thought, oh, my heavens, I have never thought about this at all that way. And I thought to come to you and say, I don’t know if she was right. I don’t know if this makes any sense at all, but what are we looking at in terms of the economy with the extraordinary instability of the United States on the world stage right now?

PK: Okay, so let me first of all just say that, one resource curse that we have in the U.S. is an actual resource curse. We would not be rejecting renewable energy, we would not be rejecting electrotech, probably, if we didn’t have all of this oil and gas. That in some sense, our politics are kind of polluted by the power of our own fossil fuel industry. And that’s actually probably ending up being an economic disadvantage. So just to say that we’re not that diff