Joseph Noel Walker
@JosephNWalker • 13,026 subscribers
Host, The Joe Walker Podcast
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New episode! Learned a lot chatting with Martin Parkinson about the economics of migration policy. The issue that most people haven't properly understood: Australia has built an economy that requires roughly 2 million more workers than our population of citizens and permanent residents can supply. We've drifted into a guest-worker system that no government ever proposed. Is it possible to have an ethical temporary program for unskilled workers where there is no path to permanency? And what does that look like? We also discuss: - International student fees now fund close to 50% of the cost of all university research in Australia, which means a cap on student numbers trades off with research, R&D, and ultimately productivity. (Australian R&D spending already sits at 1.7% of GDP versus an OECD average of 2.7%.) - Australia has 250,000 skilled migrants -- including 50,000 engineers, 20,000 teachers, 16,000 nurses, and 1,300 electricians -- who were admitted because their qualifications were assessed as commensurate with Australian standards, but who cannot work in their fields because of state-government and professional-body licensing barriers. - The Australian skilled-occupation list is based on a 2001 taxonomy, which is why employers trying to bring in a global procurement manager were forced to map the role to "supermarket manager." - The Australian points test is "dumb": being 40 years and 1 month old gets you dramatically fewer points than being 39 years and 11 months -- Canada's system steps down gradually, ours falls off a cliff. - Indonesia's diaspora in Australia is 90,000 people -- the same size as Fiji's, and roughly 0.03% of Indonesia's population -- despite Indonesia being projected to become the world's fourth-largest economy by 2045. - And much more. Watch below - or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Timestamps: (0:00:00) – Introduction. (0:02:37) – What surprised Parkinson about Australia's immigration system? (0:10:20) – How does migration affect Australians' living standards? (0:16:56) – The political equilibrium (0:19:23) – What are the objectives of the migration program? (0:24:01) – The drift into a guest-worker system (0:41:40) – How leveraged are universities to international students? (0:47:56) – Should we have an official low-skilled migration program? (0:51:32) – Using migration to slow population ageing (0:58:42) – What "skills shortage" actually means (1:08:17) – Problems with the points test (1:14:52) – Our Soviet-style occupation list (1:24:45) – We need to better utilise our skilled migrants (1:34:39) – What is the biggest problem with Australia's migration system? (1:42:01) – How can we attract true global talent? (1:45:58) – Is the migration system robust to AI disruption? (1:53:38) – What should the upper/lower bound for net migration be? (1:56:43) – The Indonesian question (2:06:53) – How much more strategic weight would a bigger population buy us?
Joseph Noel Walker169,846 views • 1 month ago
Episode 2 of my Immigration Series: Australian immigration policy is genuinely sui generis. Not even Australians fully appreciate this. A potted history: - The only country to have run assisted passage at scale -- around 3.5 million people whose fares were subsidised, sometimes fully, in a program that began in the 1830s and ran for around 150 years, ending only in 1981. - The first country in the world to have a dedicated Department of Immigration (founded 1945). - Probably the only nation in history to have set an explicit population target after WWII -- 1% growth from migration plus 1% from natural increase. - The first country in the world to offer adult migrants English-language training (in 1948, still running) and (I'm pretty sure) a telephone interpreting service for migrants (from 1973). - In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Australia took 60,000 Indochinese refugees -- proportionally more per population than any other country in the world. - One of the earliest countries in the world to introduce mandatory detention for unlawful non-citizens (1992). - Per capita, it's been the world's largest receiver of international students for decades. - The OECD country with the highest share of overseas-born among countries with more than 10 million people -- around 32%, about 8-9x the world average, and projected to climb into the 40s, a level likely not seen in Australia since the 1880s. I discussed the history of Australia's migration exceptionalism with Mark Cully. Mark has written the first truly general history of Australian immigration (to be published later this year). He has direct experience, having served as the inaugural Chief Economist of Australia's Department of Immigration. We discuss the six most decisive decades in Australian migration history, as well as some bigger picture questions: - has migration actually increased Australians' living standards (Mark believes it probably hasn't)? - the three potential constraints on our ability to accept migrants, and which has tended to be binding in practice - what does history teach us about the rise of One Nation? - and much more. Watch below, or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Timestamps: (0:00:00) – Introduction. (0:03:21) – Why didn't Australia turn to slavery? (0:10:17) – The decade that made modern Australia (1850s) (0:20:51) – What was White Australia really about? (0:30:23) – The most epic policy experiment in Australian history (the postwar migration program) (1:01:57) – The 1970s: an underrated decade (1:07:02) – The drift into a temporary-migrant economy (1:21:49) – Inside the chief economist's office (1:28:56) – Culture, social cohesion, and integration (2:01:17) – Has migration made Australia richer? (2:06:56) – The main constraint on Australian immigration over the past 200 years (2:16:11) – What makes Australian immigration exceptional?
Joseph Noel Walker149,572 views • 1 month ago
Hugh White - Australia’s foremost strategic analyst - takes me through the 11 books that have most shaped his thinking on strategy, international relations and defence policy. Available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00:00 - Introduction. 0:03:44 - Donald Kagan: The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War 0:29:03 - Garrett Mattingly: The Defeat of the Spanish Armada 0:47:08 - A. J. P. Taylor: The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848–1918 1:25:07 - Barbara Tuchman: The Guns of August 1:44:49 - A. J. P. Taylor: The Origins of the Second World War 2:21:13 - E. H. Carr: The Twenty Years' Crisis 2:49:03 - Michael Howard: The Continental Commitment 3:07:50 - George F. Kennan: American Diplomacy 3:25:19 - Neville Meaney: The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901–1914 3:33:39 - Henry Kissinger: Diplomacy 3:48:59 - Paul Kennedy: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers 4:00:14 - General questions.
Joseph Noel Walker444,482 views • 7 months ago
I asked Hugh White: If he could force every Australian statesman and stateswoman to read one book, what would it be? His answer: A.J.P. Taylor's The Origins of The Second World War. What if he could prescribe a book to the members of the CCP's Politburo? "They've read 'em all"
Joseph Noel Walker286,345 views • 7 months ago
Mike Pezzullo ran Australia's immigration apparatus for nearly a decade. We discuss how Australia actually selects and integrates migrants. This is the final episode in my immigration series. Mike oversaw Operation Sovereign Borders from 2013-2014. He then ran the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (which became Home Affairs) from 2014 to 2023. Across these roles, he was responsible for how Australia selects migrants, screens for risk, and thinks about social cohesion. Someone with so much institutional knowledge would rarely be both recently retired and willing to speak in great depth about how the system really works. We discuss: - How the broad spread of source countries among Australia's overseas-born population (a key to our success with acculturating migrants) is a happy accident, not the result of deliberate policy -- a remarkable fact about modern Australia which is not well understood. - What the migrant selection process looks like at a concrete level, and whether AI will favour the gamers or the gatekeepers. - Australia hasn't gotten worse at acculturating migrants. As Pezzullo puts it: "we are incredibly successful at blending together different demographies, ethnicities, religions, and cultures." (With one exception, which we discuss.) - The two groups that Pezzullo thinks present the greatest extremist-threat. - Australia vs France as a case study: why we've been much more successful at integrating migrants than France, and what that has to do with the history of France's style of imperialism (different to British imperialism). - Even with today's federated digital screening and the benefit of hindsight, Pezzullo doubts the father of the Bondi attackers would have been refused a student visa in 1998. - A never-aired constitutional fix to Australia's "permanent temporaries" problem -- which Pezzullo calls "the Pezzullo special": close off the High Court's original jurisdiction over non-citizens, and replace it with a single 30-day review. - What a 2027 China-Taiwan blockade would mean for the Australian migration system in real time, and how Pezzullo would manage it operationally. - The case for "populate or perish" returning as strategic policy: speaking "as a military strategist and a military defence planner," Pezzullo (who is also a former Deputy Secretary of the Department of Defence and wrote the 2009 White Paper that reputedly displeased Beijing) wants Australia at 40 million people by 2050, rather than the projected 35 million. - And much more. Watch below, or on YouTube, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Timestamps: (0:00:00) – Introduction. (0:02:19) – How Australia selects migrants. (0:37:01) – Australia's broad distribution of source countries is a happy accident. (1:05:03) – Acculturation services. (1:48:50) – The temporary migration dilemma. (2:07:56) – Social cohesion and the politics of immigration. (2:40:22) – Radical Islamism and the limits of selection. (3:03:35) – What if China blockades Taiwan tomorrow? (3:14:13) – Should 'populate or perish' make a comeback?
Joseph Noel Walker72,207 views • 1 month ago
No author has shaped my worldview more than Nassim Taleb (Nassim Nicholas Taleb). I stumbled on The Black Swan eight years ago, then inhaled the rest of the Incerto. I've increasingly come to appreciate the importance of its ideas to prolonging the human story. Was an honour to speak with Nassim on the podcast. Hard to summarise our conversation, but the timestamps below capture the gist. Enjoy! Timestamps: (0:00:55) - Heuristics for knowing when you're in Mediocristan versus Extremistan. (0:06:06) - Are certain tail exponents intrinsic? (0:10:30) - Why hasn't Universa's tail hedging strategy now been fully priced in? (0:11:52) - Does the power law distribution of startup returns mean VCs should concentrate their bets, or spray and pray? (0:15:20) - Nassim's 30-minute take on the field of behavioural economics. (0:48:57) - Nassim's 20-minute take on superforecasting. (1:11:03) - The Precautionary Principle and AI. (1:17:28) - What are LLMs doing? (1:23:10) - War, violence, & "the empirical mean is not the real mean". (1:39:17) - Covid, & how Western governments think about tail risk. (1:43:38) - What's the most important thing people in social science get wrong about correlation? (1:52:58) - How does Nassim explain the perspicacity of the Russian school of probability? (1:55:56) - Why doesn't Hayek's knowledge argument extend to prediction markets? (1:58:26) - If mean absolute deviation is a better measure than standard deviation, why has the latter become commonplace? (2:01:09) - Nassim's next book, and what he's up to at the moment.
Joseph Noel Walker577,821 views • 1 year ago
The most cancer-causing pathogen in the world is Helicobacter pylori. It lives in the stomach of about half the world's population. As the leading cause of stomach cancer, it's therefore responsible for about 5% of the total burden of new cancer cases globally. It's also the leading cause of peptic ulcers. It's crazy to think that until H. pylori was discovered, ulcers were simply put down to stress; there was no real cure. ("Time to retire", etc.) Happily, H. pylori is eradicable with antibiotics. We didn't discover H. pylori until 1979. We could've discovered it decades earlier, but the relevant literatures were too siloed and there was an ironclad medical dogma that the stomach was sterile. Even after the link between H. pylori and gastritis / peptic ulcers / gastric cancer was established in the mid-1980s, it still took a full decade before it became mainstream consensus. It's an amazing reminder of how scientific knowledge diffuses much more slowly than you might expect. I had the honour of interviewing Barry Marshall (Barry Marshall), who (along with Robin Warren) won the 2005 Nobel Prize for discovering the bug and its link to gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. Barry is also famous for proving this causality by drinking the bacteria and making himself sick. Links below. Enjoy! Timestamps: (0:00:00) - Introduction. (0:01:53) - Was H. pylori behind Darwin's dyspepsia and Napoleon's cancer? (0:09:57) - Which cancer has killed the most in history? (0:12:18) - Why stomach cancer fell in the West. (0:15:05) - Why are duodenal ulcers and stomach cancer mutually exclusive? Both are caused by H. pylori. (0:26:15) - Quick gastrointestinal anatomy lesson. (0:30:15) - The "H. pylori enigmas" (Africa, India, Costa Rica, etc). (0:35:15) - Is there a "point of no return" in the cascade from H. pylori infection to stomach cancer? (0:43:11) - Joe does a urea breath test live on the pod! (1:08:40) - What Barry learned about manufacturing by trying to make millions of H. pylori tests in Perth. (1:16:50) - Four clues to the existence of H. pylori. (If you'd known these, you could have discovered it without even laying eyes on it.) (1:25:58) - How MEDLINE/the internet enabled the discovery. (1:31:45) - Why wasn't H. pylori discovered earlier than 1979? (1:37:45) - How fiberoptic endoscopes enabled the discovery. (1:38:44) - The 1954 Palmer null result and its fallout. (1:43:08) - Scientific knowledge diffuses more slowly than you'd expect (H. pylori as a case study). (1:44:49) - If H. pylori was discovered in 2015, would mainstream acceptance still have taken 10 years? (1:47:40) - Self-experimentation in science. (1:55:40) - Barry reflects on his partnership with Robin Warren (with whom he shared the Nobel). (2:07:09) - Benefits of H. pylori? (2:09:45) - Eradication prospects & vaccine timeline. (2:14:29) - Blurring infectious vs chronic disease.
Joseph Noel Walker296,469 views • 10 months ago
David Deutsch (David Deutsch) on the poverty of 'P(Doom)': "If you ask somebody, 'What's your subjective probability for AI Doom?', well, if they say anything other than zero or one, then your interlocutor has already won the argument. Because even if you said 'one in a million', they'll say, 'Well, one in a million is much too high a probability for the end of the human race, so you've got to do everything we say now to avoid that at all costs.' And the cost is irrelevant because the utility is infinitely negative. And this argument has all been about nothing, because you're arguing about the content of the other person's brain. Which actually has nothing to do with the real probability – which is unknowable – of a physical event that's going to be subject to unimaginably vast numbers of unknown forces in the future. So, much better to talk about a thing like that by talking about substance. Talking about what the probabilities in somebody's mind are is irrelevant. And it's always irrelevant unless you're talking about an actual random physical process." (Links to the full conversation below.)
Joseph Noel Walker371,558 views • 2 years ago
Had so much fun chatting with Greg Kaplan (Greg Kaplan) and Michael Brennan of e61 Institute about Australia's stagnant productivity growth and how to fix it. The 2010s saw Australia's weakest productivity growth in 60 years. It was in many ways a lost decade. And it's dragging on—unlike the US, we haven't bounced out of covid with strong productivity growth. We discuss the extent to which this is being (i) caused by frontier-wide factors; (ii) caused by Australia-specific factors; and (iii) simply an artefact of how productivity is measured. We also go into a bunch of specific ideas, like: - why it could be better to densify Canberra than Sydney/Melbourne; - what should Albo do if he was bullish on AI; and - what we can learn from the stunning innovativeness of Australia's agricultural sector. And we discuss deeper questions around the role of government—as it's not really clear what levers the government currently has over productivity (at least for its *growth rate*). Links below. Enjoy! Timestamps: (0:00:00) - Introduction. (0:01:47) - Why has construction productivity stagnated—in Australia and the West? (0:08:38) - Can housing supply meaningfully grow just by improving construction productivity (without planning reform)? (0:12:50) - If construction and regulatory bottlenecks ease, what becomes the new supply constraint? (0:21:49) - Would densifying Sydney/Melbourne deliver big productivity gains—or should smaller cities scale? (0:29:48) - The most important limitations of GDP as a metric. (0:34:29) - Growth accounting in ~8 minutes: capital, labour, TFP. (0:43:04) - Is there a single “north-star” metric for policymakers? (0:47:12) - Should policymakers care more about TFP or labour productivity? (0:52:11) - Why revenue per worker is an imperfect proxy for firm-level productivity. (0:56:00) - Do these measurement critiques change what policy should do now? (0:58:25) - Stylised facts about the Australian economy. (1:04:01) - Status update on the health of the Australian economy. (1:06:43) - What would it take for Australia to be the richest country again? (1:11:23) - What growth rates are realistically achievable for Australia? (1:15:24) - How much GDP do we forgo over 10 years if weak productivity persists? (1:16:23) - Services, Baumol’s cost disease, and measurement. (1:29:18) - Lowest-hanging fruit for quality/productivity gains in services. (1:35:29) - Australia-specific vs frontier-wide causes of the slowdown. (1:39:51) - Best/worst Australian industries for TFP (i.e. “MFP”) growth over recent decades. (1:53:18) - Why has TFP slowed across almost every industry? (The chart behind the slowdown.) (1:59:41) - What is Australia’s “single most productive” company? (2:01:43) - Which industries have the biggest gaps between frontier and laggard firms? (2:07:53) - Is the median US firm more productive than its Australian counterpart, or is the US average skewed by superstars? (2:10:10) - What would Australian management look like if we converged on US practices? (2:13:15) - Why has the US—almost alone among rich countries—had strong recent productivity growth? (2:15:11) - How much of the US–Australia TFP gap is “culture”? (2:21:21) - Minimum reforms needed to restore 1–2% annual labour-productivity growth? (2:24:38) - Beyond Sydney/Melbourne: building (or scaling) new cities. (2:28:59) - If you were Anthony Albanese and bullish on AI, what would you do? (2:31:21) - How important is the CSIRO to Australia’s TFP? (2:33:02) - Three sensible reforms: tax; carbon pricing; road-user charging. (2:40:46) - Are the 1980s microeconomic reforms overrated? (2:44:33) - What levers reach the productivity growth rate—or is lifting levels the only game? (2:49:54) - Are we too concerned about the reform era ending? (2:56:12) - Most non-obvious lessons from the reform era.
Joseph Noel Walker128,950 views • 11 months ago
Ken Henry: " I remember I had a conversation with Kevin Rudd shortly after he became Prime Minister in November, 2007. He said, just out of the blue, 'What do you think the sustainable population of Australia is?' At the time, the Australian population was probably about 22, 23 million. And I said, 'I don't know, about 15 million.' And he said, he said '50 million. Right. That's what I think too.' And I said, 'No, no, no, no, no. 15. One five, not five zero.' He said, 'How could you, how could you say that? The population's already well in excess of that.' And I said, 'And you think this is sustainable?' But then I said to him, 'But I could imagine... a set of policies that would make a population of 50 million sustainable on this continent.' ... Why don't we build a whole new city of 10 million people in a place that presently has nobody? ... Economists are not comfortable with this idea, this sort of planning from on high... And I'm not comfortable with it, but I'm also not comfortable with what I see playing out. The population in Sydney last year and in Melbourne, both cities, increased by 150,000. Like holy hell. I think the optimal city size, if you read the literature on this stuff, at least that written by economists, the optimal city size is somewhere around about 150,000. There's two cities, brand new cities we could have built in 12 months."
Joseph Noel Walker136,869 views • 1 year ago
If you search for “stomach” in the letters of Charles Darwin (link below), you’ll see that for most of his life he was tortured by stomach pain. It made him miserable and a recluse. We now know the cause. In an exceptionally niche scoop for my podcast, Nobel laureate Barry Marshall (Barry Marshall) reveals that, according to a yet-to-be-published paper Barry coauthored with a friend, whiskers from Darwin’s beard were collected from his desk by his maid after he died and were preserved. Some of these whiskers came into the possession of Barry’s unnamed friend. PCR testing on the whiskers has revealed that Darwin was infected by the stomach bacterium Helicobacter pylori. His problems were most likely caused by this bug - not by the “nervous dyspepsia” his quack doctor put them down to. H. pylori was rampant in Europe in the 19th century, and was likely behind the stomach ailments of many famous figures, from Darwin to Alfred Nobel (who also suffered chronic stomach pain) and Napoleon (who was probably killed by stomach cancer at the age of 51). Today, it's eminently treatable, thanks to the work of Barry and his late collaborator Robin Warren. Makes you grateful to live in the modern world (also, PCR is truly an incredible technology).
Joseph Noel Walker62,943 views • 10 months ago
Australia's Productivity Commission Chair Danielle Wood on: - why AI probably won't cause a jobpocalypse, - how Australia can get a piece of the AI action, - why profits may not flow to the model layer of the stack, - and why Australia shouldn't follow the EU in legislating an AI Act -- even if AI turns out to be an "abnormal" technology. Watch below, or wherever you get your podcasts. Enjoy! Timestamps: (0:00:00) – Introduction. (0:01:43) – Is AI as big as the Industrial Revolution? (0:06:35) – The labour market implications of AI (0:21:18) – Industry policy for AI: when to intervene, when to step back (0:31:27) – Where will the profits flow? Chips, models, or applications? (0:52:37) – Data centres: should Australia support them? (1:15:07) – AI risks, and why Australia shouldn't pass an AI Act (1:23:27) – Measuring progress in the age of AI: beyond GDP and labour productivity
Joseph Noel Walker11,751 views • 1 month ago
The time has come to break the Sydney-Melbourne duopoly. I think a large part of what makes the UK, for example, so pathologically broken is that they have all their eggs in the London basket. We’re only one city away from that. Where are Australia’s Austins and Phoenixes? Why aren't we scaling more cities to +1 million, or building new ones altogether? This question has come up in a couple of my podcast chats. A couple of years ago, Ken Henry revealed to me that Treasury had once looked into it. And last week, when I asked Greg Kaplan (Greg Kaplan) and Michael Brennan (former Australian Productivity Commissioner) for the most ambitious idea they've encountered for raising Australian productivity, it came up again:
Joseph Noel Walker55,510 views • 11 months ago
New episode with former US Treasury Secretary and current OpenAI board member Larry Summers (Lawrence H. Summers). We discuss: - How he's been learning about AI. - The odds of the technology delivering a much faster economic growth regime (akin to the Industrial Revolution). - How AGI might change economic policymaking. Enjoy! Timestamps: (0:00:00) - Introduction. (0:00:46) - Larry's journey teaching himself about AI & deep learning since joining OpenAI’s board. (0:09:15) - How many hours per week has Larry been spending on OpenAI-related stuff? (0:10:16) - Which bottleneck to AI scaling does Larry think is the most underrated? (0:12:22) - Approximately what share of time do today's AI researchers spend on tasks that AI will be doing for them in five years? (0:15:01) - What explains the remarkable steadiness of US economic growth over the last 150 years? (0:19:42) - How likely is it that AI initiates a new growth regime with average growth that’s ~10x faster than today? (0:21:36) - What are the best economic arguments for believing AI won’t deliver a regime of ever-increasing growth rates? (0:25:33) - How much could AGI boost economic growth in developing countries merely by helping their policymakers make better decisions? (0:28:20) - How much better could monetary policy be if the Fed had AGI? (0:31:40) - How much would having AGI have helped US economic policymakers during the financial crisis & Great Recession? (0:36:07) - Is the CCP infiltrating and stealing the IP of major AI labs in the US and UK? (0:39:35) - At what point should AI be nationalised? (0:42:39) - How would Bill Clinton or Barack Obama be thinking about AI governance? (0:44:27) - If OpenAI restructures to a public benefit corporation, how does that change its incentives? (0:46:18) - What does Daron Acemoglu miss in his analysis of the economic impacts of AI?
Joseph Noel Walker85,856 views • 1 year ago
It was an honour to host the first ever public dialogue between David Deutsch (David Deutsch) and Steven Pinker (Steven Pinker). They are longstanding admirers of each other's work. I view Steve's defence of the Enlightenment as more empirical, whereas David's is built more on first principles. But beyond their shared rational optimism, what else do they agree – or disagree – about? Topics we discuss are well captured by the timestamps below. Links to YouTube, transcript, Apple Podcasts, & Spotify in tweet below. Enjoy! Timestamps: (0:00:00) - Introduction (0:03:09) - Is AGI even possible? (0:10:17) - Scientific method will constrain runaway superintelligence (0:11:56) - Does AGI need agency to be creative? (0:28:31) - Will AGIs be sentient? (0:37:06) - AGI & AI safety (0:47:44) - P(doom) & subjective probabilities (0:53:21) - Prediction markets (1:01:43) - Universal explainers & The Language Instinct (1:04:43) - Universal explainers & heritability of behavioural traits (1:27:59) - Differential technological development (1:36:09) - What explains the Great Stagnation? (1:46:13) - Should presumed physical limits to growth make us pessimistic?
Joseph Noel Walker111,747 views • 2 years ago