Mark York
280 posts
@MarkYorkMN
U.S. Senate Candidate | Farmer, Computer Scientist | Public Servant | Raises pigs, not taxes | Join our team at https://t.co/7fkjB0V02E
Ala Stanford, PA-03 candidate, freezes when asked who would enforce immigration laws if ICE is abolished and asks NBC to pause the interview so she can think about it "It's a good question. And you can um– pause because I just want to think about it." "Well, we need to continue though." "Oh, okay. Who do I think should be in charge of enforcing immigration laws? Not the executive branch, because the executive branch is self-serving." "But who should be on the ground? I mean, there are immigration laws in this country, and a border. If you've abolished ICE, who handles it?" "Understood. So you can't– Once you abolish you have to rebuild." "So are you saying have no ICE?" "I'm saying the connotation of that word is so negative that you would need a new name."
The Trump EPA is proving every day that you can both protect the environment AND grow the economy. No longer is it a binary choice where we are forced to pick one or the other.
Watch how a $5K investment in US and China equity markets in 2011 grew by 2025.
New essay on the economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work. 1. Almost any question about the impact of advanced AI on the economy needs to start at the same place: what is still scarce? Answer that, and the analysis becomes pretty straightforward. This essay explores what becomes scarce if AI really can replicate most of what humans do in production, and what this mean for the future of jobs. 2. My conjecture, working through the economics: labor reallocates across sectors, and the sector it reallocates to has properties that keep labor a meaningful share of the economy. Ultimately this is about the structure of demand itself. For this, we have to go back to Girard, Augustine and Rousseau: once people's base needs are met, their preferences shift to comparative motives (e.g., status, exclusivity, social desirability). This motive is inherently non-satiated. 4. The key paper is Comin, Lashkari, and Mestieri (Econometrica 2021). As people get richer, they don't buy proportionally more of everything. They shift spending toward sectors with higher income elasticity. They estimate income effects account for 75%+ of observed structural change. 5. The ironic consequence: the sector that gets automated becomes a smaller share of the economy, not a larger one. Agriculture got massively more productive and its share of employment collapsed. Manufacturing too. The "stagnant" sectors absorb the spending and the jobs. 6. So the question is: which sectors have high income elasticity in a post-AGI world? I argue it's what I call the relational sector. Categories where the human isn't just an input into production, it is part of the value. 7. Why does the relational sector have high income elasticity? Because human desire has a mimetic, relational dimension. We don't just want things for their intrinsic properties. We want what others want, and we want it more when others can't have it. Girard, Rousseau, Augustine, and Hobbes all saw this. 8. In work with Kristóf Madarász, we showed this experimentally: WTP roughly doubles when a random subset of others is excluded from the good. And in new work with Graelin Mandel, AI involvement kills the premium. Human-made art gains 44% from exclusivity; AI-made art only 21%. 9. This all comes together for the core argument. The sector that absorbs spending as AI makes commodity production cheap is one where human provenance is part of the value, and demand for it grows faster than income. Exactly the profile that keeps labor meaningful. 10. To be clear about the claim: I'm NOT saying aggregate labor share must rise. It may fall. The claim is about sectoral composition, i.e., where expenditure and employment go once commodities get cheap, and the fact that the sector that will absorb reallocated labor maps to a substantial component of human preferences and desire. 11. If you're interested in the formal model, a linked companion technical note works out all the economics. Read the essay here: aleximas.substack.com/p/what-will-be…
MIT students got bored on a Saturday night and turned an entire building into a playable game of Tetris, rigging every window with LEDs at midnight. These kids are going to run the world and we should let them.
