Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
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
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
10 Sep 2026 Leave a 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?
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?
17 Jul 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation Tags: creative destruction, The Great Enrichment
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
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
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
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
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
17 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of media and culture, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, industrial organisation, law and economics, managerial economics, market efficiency, movies, organisational economics, politics - USA, television Tags: competition law, creative destruction, merger law enforcement
Big mergers make headlines. They don’t always make antitrust problems. In a previous commentary, I explored the antitrust implications of a potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD). That uncertainty is now resolved. On Feb. 27, Paramount Skydance Corp. agreed to acquire WBD for roughly $110 billion in enterprise value—$31 per share, all cash. The…
The Paramount Question Isn’t Paramount
11 Apr 2026 Leave a comment
in economic history, entrepreneurship Tags: creative destruction
Computers nowadays come in all shapes and sizes from a smartphone to the super computer Mira. An essential requirement nowadays is that computers are portable. It may be hard to believe but the history of portable computers goes back 45 years, even when I write it ’45 years’ I can’t believe it . I was […]
Osborne 1-First Portable Computer
17 Mar 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, development economics, economic history, entrepreneurship, growth disasters, growth miracles, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply Tags: creative destruction, The Great Enrichment
Tweet… is from page 103 of Historical Impromptus, a 2020 collection of some of Deirdre McCloskey’s work on economic history; this quotation, specifically, is from McCloskey’s 2000 review, in the Minnesota Journal of Global Trade, of Thomas Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree and John Gray’s False Dawn [original emphasis]: Globalization encourages the capitalist…
Quotation of the Day…
12 Mar 2026 1 Comment
in applied price theory, entrepreneurship, history of economic thought, industrial organisation, labour economics, labour supply, survivor principle Tags: creative destruction
Neither theory, history nor the latest data suggests a recession driven by AI job dislocation is likely By Greg Ip. Excerpts:”Technological advancements always cost some people their jobs—those whose skills can be easily substituted by tech. But their loss is more than offset through three other channels. The new technology enhances the skills of some survivors,…
Tech Has Never Caused a Job Apocalypse. Don’t Bet on It Now.
08 Mar 2026 Leave a comment
in applied price theory, economics of bureaucracy, economics of regulation, entrepreneurship, labour economics, law and economics, managerial economics, organisational economics, personnel economics, property rights, Public Choice, theory of the firm, unemployment Tags: creative destruction, employment law, European Union, Germany
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I write: Imagine how difficult it would be to get a date if every date required marriage? In the same way, it’s more difficult to find a job when every job requires a long-term commitment from the employer. In two new excellent pieces, Brian Albrecht and Pieter Garicano…
The Hidden Cost of Hard-to-Fire Labor Laws: Why European Firms Don’t Take Risks
Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
A History of the Alt-Right
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Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
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Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
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Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
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Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law
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“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.
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