Jonathan Haskel

@BenZaranko Great news Ben, many congratulations. Do keep in touch !

Some personal/professional news: today is my last day at the IFS. There’s nowhere else I’d rather have spent the last nine years and leaving is such a wrench. But it’s time for something new, and I’m excited to be joining The Observer as Economics Editor from 7 April.

The next ESCoE webinar with @JoshMartin_econ will present productivity estimates for 184 UK industries - more than double the detail in official datasets: tinyurl.com/yj8atwyj

@RichardALJones Excellent post Richard.

But the economic growth hasn’t arrived, yet. What happens if it doesn’t? My blogpost: The UK’s big bet on science and technology softmachines.org/?p=3268

For more than a decade, there’s been a cross-party consensus behind increasing the UK govt’s R&D spending to drive economic growth - & there’s been a substantial real terms increase in the science budget...

@BenRamanauskas V interesting Ben. My worry is that the policies you mention have raised U* so even at current activity levels there’s more inflationary pressure than we think. So look through but hold cuts.

New blog post! The Iran War will lead to an energy shock which could raise headline inflation. However, this will be transitory so the Bank of England should ignore it and, given the overall state of the economy, the Bank needs to keep cutting interest rates. Link in thread.

@cricketwyvern V interesting. Another avenue is an drop-in-investment effect? economicsobservatory.com/how-has-brexit…

Latest trade data: ons.gov.uk/economy/nation… OBR Forecasts: obr.uk/efo/economic-a…

UK trade data for 2025 published yesterday. We now have 10 years of data since the EU ref & 5 since we left the customs union. Remember the OBR forecast Brexit would reduce UK trade by 15% (hence their forecast of a 4% hit to productivity). Let’s see how that is working out …

@hamiltonproj @DAcemogluMIT @davidautor @baselinescene @NatashaRSarin #AIPlusWork . Thank you for v interesting talk. Question; what if other countries with whom we trade introduce non-pro worker AI?

HAPPENING NOW: Join us in a few minutes for a webinar on pro-worker AI, featuring @DAcemogluMIT, @davidautor, @baselinescene, and @NatashaRSarin. hamiltonproject.org/event/building…

I just took my first Waymo One ride in San Francisco! Fantastic.

@erikbryn @FT Agree with you Erik. Thread here with similar view. You can see AI in the US productivity data esp if you look at software….

Since my op-ed in the @FT was published on Monday (ft.com/content/4b51d0…), there’s been a growing debate about whether we’re beginning to see evidence that AI is boosting productivity. First, let me be clear that the aggregate productivity data by itself is far from definitive. Even with the new revisions, there is certainly a lot of noise in US productivity numbers. No doubt lots of other factors are at work. That said, my growing confidence that AI is powering higher productivity draws on evidence from a variety of sources: 1. The stunning capabilities of AI. If anything, I think the past decade of impressive improvements in machine learning and generative AI are still underrated. We are in the early stages of a massive economic transformation: digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/research-area/… 2. A growing number of micro studies document double-digit productivity gains in specific applications. @alexolegimas has a great catalog in his blog post: aleximas.substack.com/p/what-is-the-… 3. My discussions with power users who use AI for coding, customer service, research and other applications, as well as more and more business executives, convince me that the facts on the ground are (finally) changing. 4. Data from our Canaries in the Coal Mine paper show employment changes in occupations most affected by AI: digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publication/ca… 5. And now, inklings in the aggregate productivity data are also telling the same story. These are all consistent with the hypothesis that AI is beginning to have a positive impact on productivity. The FT put a more definitive headline on my recent piece than I would have liked, but my bet (longbets.org/868/) is that we're likely to see more and more evidence as time goes on, barring some other shocks (e.g. macro mismanagement, trade wars, etc). As each quarter goes by and we see more data, I continue to update my views. No doubt, I'm currently out of sync with a lot of mainstream economists on this topic, but that’s ok by me.

MNI INTERVIEW: AI Boom Doesn't Justify Lower Rates - Haskel mnimarkets.com/articles/mni-i…

@s8mb @dc_lawrence good q sam. I think: big barriers to firm entry in hospitality and/or monopsony power => marg firm has low prod & high profit => big prod gains from reallocation.

@haskelecon @dc_lawrence Yeah, interesting. What would have to be true for their model to be right? Big barriers to job switching?

@s8mb @dc_lawrence V interesting. IMHO it’s a confusion of marginal and average. The average hospitality firm has low productivity. But capital moves between industries. So marginal hospitality firm is just as productive as a similar capital/skill firm in, say, wholesale.

I agree. And I think they have a misconception that workers get “used up” by existing businesses and you need to kill the businesses via external means to free them up for more productive uses. Kind of Austrian business cycle theory without a theory about why they don’t just move for normal profit-seeking reasons.

My attempt to set in context the biggest upheaval in UK science funding policy since the 1980s: UK Science Policy in Transition softmachines.org/?p=3252

Brilliant post onAI and growth by ⁦@BrianCAlbrecht⁩ and ⁦@RebelEconProf⁩ open.substack.com/pub/pricetheor…

@BenRamanauskas @KallumPickering @julianHjessop @realVickyPryce Fair enough. But need to be sure headline rate signals underlying trends? IMHO impaired lab market makes underlying inflation sticky. Projected wage rises of 3.7% above target consistent, unless prod growth picks up.

@haskelecon @KallumPickering @julianHjessop @realVickyPryce I still think inflation is going to return to target pretty soon (and possibly fall below) so 3% is very plausible.

New blog post! It's on why the Bank of England should cut interest rates this week - even though it almost certainly won't. opportunitylost.substack.com/p/what-should-…

@donwinslow A brilliant story in a brilliant collection. IMHO this century’s Raymond Chandler.

LONDON. Crime 101 opens IN THEATERS around the world FEB 13

@BenRamanauskas @KallumPickering @julianHjessop @realVickyPryce Agree. Going as far as 3% will be too far given how sticky inflation is

@KallumPickering @julianHjessop @realVickyPryce @haskelecon Yeah, for me it's 3% and I reckon the Bank will be reluctant to go that far but will probs start being more aggresive from April. opportunitylost.substack.com/p/how-low-will…

Icymi , thread on our paper x.com/haskelecon/sta…

Where is AI showing up in the productivity data? via @FT Thanks to ⁦@SoumayaKeynes⁩ for featuring our productivity work cc. ⁦@carolcorrado⁩ ft.com/content/d6fdc0…

@billwells_1 @ONS Thx Bill. A good reason to introduce slowly. And it’s by no means all the basket. But real consumers,as you know, are transacting digitally. And it’s striking to me at any rate that the current sample looks close to the bigger scanner dataset, showing sampling is doing its job

@haskelecon @ONS A little concerned this is another example of 'digital by default' hopefully it doesn't lead to collected data becoming unrepresentative - overuse of supermarkets with computers Arguable approach damages measurement? RTI/PAYE employees & UC; LFS phones [Won't mention PO Horizon]

Fantastic work by @ons here!

Looking forward to discussing geopolitics at @LSEnews next Wednesday 4th Feb with @haskelecon and Steve Lynch (@britishchambers). Will draw upon my recent research on #MPIs and #centralbank comms. @CFMUK @CamEcon studentsunionucl.org/whats-on/event…