politics

About halfway through the latest All In Podcast, they dove into the AI Doom-vs.-Boom debate. A couple quick thoughts:

1. They kept assuming that higher productivity means higher wages and better living standards. That hasn’t been true since the late ’70s—policy has decoupled productivity gains from average workers’ pay (see the EPI’s “productivity–pay gap” data: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/). Productivity goes up, but pay doesn’t.

2. Labeling concerns about AI-driven layoffs for managerial positions as “fearmongering” misses the point. Sure, entry-level roles might be the first to go. But what happens to the managers whose job it was to oversee those now-unneeded positions?

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3MTSo0kmsIHRxtsJkP9Km8?si=uBxajDLZSIWoNxydL5w_sg&t=2694&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A2IqXAVFR4e0Bmyjsdc8QzF

So right. And again just reiterates how arbitrary so much of how we measure economic growth and improvement is