The Great Enrichment
04 Nov 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation Tags: The Great Enrichment, creative destruction
The Great Enrichment
01 Nov 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, entrepreneurship Tags: creative destruction, The Great Enrichment
Will bystander economies be able to finance their governments?
24 Oct 2026 1 Comment
in Public Choice, entrepreneurship, macroeconomics, public economics, economic growth, applied price theory, fiscal policy, budget deficits Tags: creative destruction
From Jesús Fernández-Villaverde: Will AI poison the public finances of many modern states? There is a real risk that it will. Yesterday, I circulated a new paper, “Saving for the Machines,” which makes a simple point. Building the AI transformation will require enormous investment. The only way to induce agents to save for that investment…
Will bystander economies be able to finance their governments?
AI, Redistribution, and the Size of the Pie
22 Sep 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation Tags: creative destruction
Anthropic’s economic team, including Anton Korinek and Chad Jones, have a valuable new paper, Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI. They make their assumptions explicit and provide a scenario explorer that lets you change them. How capable will AI become? How quickly will firms adopt it? Will it augment workers or automate their tasks? You can…
AI, Redistribution, and the Size of the Pie
The Growth of Big Business: 1900-2020
18 Sep 2026 Leave a comment
in development economics, econometerics, economic history, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, survivor principle Tags: creative destruction
Big firms are playing a larger role in the US economy–but also in the economies of high-income countries around the world. Yueran Ma, Mengdi Zhang, and Kaspar Zimmermann compile the evidence in “Business Concentration Around the World: 1900-2020” (University of Chicago Becker-Friedman Institute for Economics, February 27, 2026, the link offers a readable overview and a followup link…
The Growth of Big Business: 1900-2020
Growth Effects of AI: Modest for a Decade or Two, At Least
13 Sep 2026 Leave a comment
in entrepreneurship Tags: creative destruction
It is of course impossible to predict the effects of new AI technologies on total economic growth in a precise way, but there are strong reasons to believe that the effect will be modest for a decade or two, anyway. Charles Jones Jones explores some of the reasons in “AI and Our Economic Future,” in…
Growth Effects of AI: Modest for a Decade or Two, At Least
Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI
10 Sep 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic growth, industrial organisation, macroeconomics Tags: creative destruction
By Anton Korinek, Charles I. Jones, Szymon Sacher, Tess Cotter, and Peter McCrory, a strong line-up from Anthropic. They are sober, reasoned, scientific, and (for the most part) dynamically consistent. Here is the paper, here is the abstract: This paper presents a framework for assessing the economic consequences of AI between 2026 and 2030. In…
Economic Scenarios for Transformative AI
Did the Sewing Machine Reduce the Workload for Women?
10 Sep 2026 1 Comment
in discrimination, economic growth, economic history, economics of education, gender, history of economic thought, human capital, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, macroeconomics, occupational choice, poverty and inequality, technological progress Tags: creative destruction, The Great Enrichment
Is new technology that replaces a worker a good thing? We have a tendency, it seems to me, to believe that most previous inventions turned out to have overall net social benefits, but to be worried that all future inventions will instead have overall net social costs. Philipp Ager and Davide Coluccia tackle the question of…
Did the Sewing Machine Reduce the Workload for Women?
How Much Redistribution Will AI Require?
07 Sep 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, poverty and inequality, unemployment Tags: creative destruction
How much redistribution will AI require? A common scenario is that AI raises output enormously, but labor’s share of income collapses. GDP per capita goes up but workers get poorer, and making workers whole requires massive redistribution. In my latest paper, I run the numbers and conclude that this is probably incorrect. The idea is…
How Much Redistribution Will AI Require?
The Great Enrichment continues
17 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation Tags: creative destruction, The Great Enrichment
The Troubled History of Government Equity in Technology
07 Jul 2026 1 Comment
in applied price theory, economic history, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, privatisation, Public Choice, rentseeking, survivor principle Tags: creative destruction, Germany
Even though Germany privatized Deutsche Telekom in 1996, the federal government retained a substantial ownership stake. This partial state ownership status, which remains to this day, presents a textbook example of how this type of arrangement distorts incentives and delays the competitive dynamism necessary for technological progress. Through the late 1990s and into the 2000s, Deutsche Telekom…
The Troubled History of Government Equity in Technology
Artificial Intelligence, Natural Ignorance
07 Jun 2026 Leave a comment
in economics of information, economics of media and culture, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, financial economics, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, market efficiency, politics - USA, regulation, survivor principle Tags: creative destruction
Everyone in Washington seems to agree that artificial intelligence must be governed. The only real dispute is who gets the steering wheel. Congress? Federal agencies? State legislatures? Some newly minted task force with a long acronym and a taste for reporting requirements? That debate is already too narrow. President Donald Trump’s recent executive order on…
Artificial Intelligence, Natural Ignorance
Technological unemployment in Victorian Britain
29 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, econometerics, economic history, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice Tags: creative destruction
We do not know whether technological unemployment swept across England in the wake of the British Industrial Revolution. In this paper, I propose an approach to quantify jobs lost to, and created by, creative destruction in the 19th century. Using over 170 million individual records from the full-count British census (1851–1911), I generate sub-industry “task”…
Technological unemployment in Victorian Britain
The Luddites Were the First to Attack AI
28 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply Tags: creative destruction
Everyone knows the Luddites smashed looms. What is less appreciated is that the loom was the first serious programmable device — the direct ancestor of the computer. Thus, the Luddites weren’t just the first to resist automation. They were the first to attack AI. The Jacquard loom, introduced in France circa 1805, used a chain…
The Luddites Were the First to Attack AI
The President(s) Fought the Law and the Law Won
18 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economic history, history of economic thought, income redistribution, industrial organisation, international economics, labour economics, labour supply, politics - USA, poverty and inequality, Public Choice, rentseeking, survivor principle Tags: creative destruction, free trade, tarrifs
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I emphasize that Congress and the President are subject to a higher law, the law of supply and demand. In an excellent column, Jason Furman gives a clear example of how difficult it is to fight the law of inelastic demand: …Today a given number of autoworkers can…
The President(s) Fought the Law and the Law Won
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