Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation

First, I want to examine three of the most popular policy suggestions for adapting to the AI economy, many of them emanating from Silicon Valley. These three are largely “technical fixes,” tweaks to policy and business models that seek to smooth the transition but do not actually shift the culture. After examining the uses and weaknesses of these t

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The most important essay I read in the last month is by Lant Pritchett. He asks why the scarcest economic resources—entrepreneurial ability and technical talent—are going into automating an abundant resource: cheap labor. In the developed world, labor is expensive because of policy restrictions, and it is neither efficient nor equitable to use scar... See more

If right now you think I’m a horrible, marauding, free-market monster, you’re only half-right—I’m also a humanist who thinks there are better things for our children to do with their time. The quicker we eliminate the low-paying, repetitive, and menial jobs, the quicker our species can get to work on bigger issues like sustainability, being multipl

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The optimists say, “some new need for labor always pops up” (as it did in manufacturing between 1920 and, say, 1970). But (a) you can’t see much sign of that in the tech-based industries that are on the rise – they’re just not labor-intensive – and (b) the workers that technological industries require are generally better educated than those cut ad... See more