And there, I feel like the U.S. is almost a tale of two cities, in that partly what is happening is that we are an economy with just tremendous strength — note that all of the leading A.I. labs are in the United States, training their models in the United States, contributing meaningfully, they hope, over the near term to productivity growth that’s going to be realized in the United States.
Also, SpaceX’s I.P.O., just a few weeks ago, made many multimillionaires here in the United States. So really remarkable and a lot of that remarkableness has to do with the fact that — Dan, you and I are both immigrants to the United States, and we are not alone in that. A very substantial number of Fortune 500 companies have been started in this country by immigrants and the children of immigrants.
And that’s because of something that sounds kind of cheesy, I guess, but is really deep and true about the nature of the American dream: I you want to innovate, if you want to build, if you’re an entrepreneur, you disproportionately are likely to want to come to this country to have access to a network that is interested in mobilizing those types of ideas and, frankly, dollars that are potentially going to be invested in your opportunities for upward growth. Not just for you, but for starting a company that is able to employ thousands or tens of thousands of people, like the Googles of the world, or like the Microns of the world.
A lot of those fundamental tenets, about what makes the American economy great and remarkable, I worry are under some attack. And you see that with attacks on skilled immigrants that are coming in this country at the moment. I’m a law professor. I think a lot about threats to the rule of law and to institutions, and what it means when foreign investors start to get a little bit nervous about whether they can truly trust that when a court in this country makes a ruling, with respect to an important business question, whether that ruling is going to ultimately be respected.
And I think all of those questions have always kind of just been assumed. The answer to them was yes. But I worry that the dysfunction — and the movement away from a nation that is really built on the rule of law to a nation that shifts, such that it is about deals and deal making with this administration — is one that has economic consequences that are really likely to reverberate.
