Here are the ideas Democrats will fight about in 2020

Vox runs a longish interview with Paul Krugman, who has some interesting insights on a number of issues that are regularly featured on AEIdeas. The Q&A between Krugman and journalist Ezra Klein is worth reading just for the back-and-forth about what the economist and New York Times columnist thinks is really happening with automation, innovation, and US productivity growth.

Krugman sides with techno-pessimist Robert Gordon when it comes to dismissing claims that old-fashioned productivity stats are missing more growth than they used to. For instance, kitchens — a place where we spend a lot of time and do a lot of work — were a lot different in the 1950s than they were around the turn of the century. But someone today would manage just fine in the Cleaver family kitchen of the 1957 sitcom Leave It to Beaver, even if they griped about the lack of a dishwasher or microwave. “But if someone from 1957 walked into a kitchen from 1897, they’d be horrified,” Krugman says.

But Krugman is less confident than Gordon about whether information technology, particularly AI, will radically change how we live and work. Krugman:

At this point, we have two stories. One is that we have a whole new set of developments — machine learning, artificial intelligence — but we haven’t really figured out what to do with it yet, so give us time and you’ll see this transformation. That’s one story.

The other story is that all this stuff is really not that big a deal because it doesn’t affect what most people actually do for work, which increasingly is health care. It’s very visible to those of us in the chattering classes — I haven’t listened to a voicemail in years because now speech recognition is good enough that the text version of my voicemails is actually comprehensible — but how much does that affect what nurses do? Basically, the nurse is the prototypical worker of the 21st century.

I don’t know the answer.

But interesting as Krugman’s comments are, so are Klein’s questions. He asks about whether debt and deficits really matter, net neutrality, universal basic income ideas, single-payer healthcare, free college tuition, monopolies and corporate concentration, and a federal job guarantee, among other policies. Taken together, I think these topics probably provide a pretty good idea about the ideological battlespace of left-of-center wonks. Such policy thinking might be reflected in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination process.