Camden Conference in the World ~ August 2025

David Autor MIT Economics Professor 2023 Camden Conference	Hal Brands Bloomberg Columnist 2025 Camden Conference	Kaiser Kuo Sinica Podcast Presenter 2019 Camden Conference
Elizabeth Economy Senior Advisor on China, Hoover Institution 2019 Camden Conference	Arvind Subramanian Former Chief Economic Advisor to India 2024 Camden Conference	Douglas Irwin Dartmouth Economics Professor 2023 Camden Conference

MIT economics professor David Autor, a speaker at Camden’s 2023 “Global Trade and Politics” conference, co-authored a New York Times commentary last month on the “fast-approaching” China 2.0 shock. The first China shock, of 1999-2007, saw China’s sudden entry into export-oriented manufacturing erase nearly one-quarter of all US factory jobs. China 2.0 will be even more durable and impactful, Autor argues, as it targets “innovative sectors where the United States has long been the unquestioned leader: aviation, A.I., telecommunications, microprocessors, robotics, nuclear and fusion power, quantum computing, biotech and pharma, solar, batteries.” Autor expanded on this “even worse” challenge from China in an interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN’s Global Market Place (GMP).

“[US President Donald] Trump is barreling toward a bad bargain with Beijing. He’s weakening the US position in the fight for global primacy,” Bloomberg columnist and a 2025 speaker in Camden Hal Brands wrote in a very different take on the China-US competition. Also last month, New York Times columnist David Brooks quoted Brands in a piece about the importance of federal government funding for American universities during the Cold War and what the absence of such support may mean the new US Cold War with China.

No fewer than three speakers from our 2019 China conference approached China’s rapid movement into low-carbon energy and other high-tech fields over the last month. Sinica Podcast presenter Kaiser Kuo was as forceful as Autor about the paradigm change he sees China effecting in the world, conceding that he had held back for years from openly expressing “the idea that China is no longer just catching up, but redefining the arc of development itself.” Elizabeth Economy, a senior advisor on China to former President Joe Biden and now at the Hoover Institution, talked National Public Radio listeners and CNBC viewers through Trump’s expectations and desires for a meeting soon with China’s President Xi Jinping. While Ma Jun, now director of China’s Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, explained to Chinese Communist Party owned Global Times: “While China’s renewable energies are growing rapidly, their intermittent nature still requires strong grid-balancing capacity, where coal power continues to play a supportive role.”

China isn’t the only emerging power with a focus on the renewable energy transition that Trump is so determined to stymy. Arvind Subramanian, former chief economic advisor to the Indian government and a speaker at Camden’s 2024 India conference, recently co-authored a Project Syndicate piece outlining factors that account for India’s slow pace relative to China in the transition to renewables. The two top factors impeding India’s progress are “highly inefficient incumbents” in the country’s electricity transmission and distribution, and populist politics.

Dartmouth economics professor and trade historian Douglas Irwin, a speaker at our 2023 conference on trade, provided a broader perspective on Trump’s trade wars in an interview last month with podcaster for The Atlantic David Frum. The interview begins at minute 12.20 of this Frum program.