What is your take?

I don't think it's for the general, for economists at all.

It affects everybody's life.

I mean, GDP is not a perfect indicator, or GNI is not a perfect indicator of the economy, but no one is.

But if you look at real measures of human well-being, it's extraordinarily highly correlated.

I mean, you take the most basic of all life expectancies, for example, which is the most objective of all indicators, because you're either alive or dead, right? The correlation between the level of GDP per capita or GNI per capita, which is very close to it, and life expectancy is 0.73, which means basically there are some countries which do better than you would expect at a given level of income.

China does incidentally, you live about two years longer.

so so let's talk about this um this this uh concept john uh john ross i mean yeah i have two jones in in the show but john ross what are we talking about when we talk about middle income trap do we have some kind of idea

So what's the challenge? What's the problem here?

What's involved is a misunderstanding of the way that innovation leads to growth.

If you simply have an idea, it doesn't really alter the economy very much.

It is when the innovation is embodied normally in fixed investment.

You can see this very clearly in the US.

Early 1980s, when the personal computer was introduced, there was no gain in productivity for quite a lot of years.

There was a famous statement by Robert Soller, who was a famous economist, saying, You can see the productivity gain everywhere except...

Is that the case and why?

John, for you from an operator's perspective, can you talk about a situation where this was a challenge for you and how you overcame that?

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, just as Don touched on there, you know, every country, depending on where you're dealing on in the world, every country has little quirks or differences that you have to, um, potentially overcome or be aware of.

Sometimes the scenario could be having to pay more money.

Uh, we've had a, we've had a situation where, you know, you leverage your freight forwarder to help you in those situations.

Um, uh, we had an aircraft out of the Dominican.

Bit of a nightmare.

[laughs]

You say partners, but something had to make that a, a, um, collective agreement.

Well, I primarily realized how much better I'd get in that room and, uh, how, how I could push myself, and just the academic reason too with, uh, i- it's just a very good academic school and I realized then, sure he did too, so.

For NIL, or do you realistically see yourself as current 15 year olders wrestling in college, um, to pursue bigger and better things outside of NIL, like international stuff, becoming a coach somewhere, or just getting a degree making hundreds of thousands of dollars?

So I, I see myself wrestling in college to both, uh, work to, like, achieve all my goals within college and outside of college with wrestling, and I also see myself to w- use wrestling to achieve all my goals a- like for what career I wanna pursue and all that stuff, which happens outside of college.