
Nicholas Name
1.8K posts

Nicholas Name
@NicholasName001
-GWOT was stupid, but it wasn't boring-



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…






I think we can agree the issue is internationalist leftism. Reactionary right-wing stuff can be an issue too, but they're exactly that. Can we make a pact to destroy the Communists and their ilk, together?





I have a genuine question. Many scientists say humans evolved from apes and other primates. So why don’t we see that kind of evolution happening today? Why does it seem like it stopped?



Most American Muslims aren't immigrants. They're born and raised here. And they're not that different from the Republican base when it comes to questions of homosexuality, gender, and family. We don't ask Republicans to "assimilate" into American liberal culture. 1/



Satellite images from March 28 show destroyed pistachio warehouses near Rafsanjan Airport in Kerman—the heart of #Iran’s pistachio industry. Iran was once the world’s largest pistachio exporter, but years of trade embargoes have allowed the US to cut into its market share. The choice of target in Rafsanjan points to a deliberate economic strategy.

Update Account collapse became physical collapse. Heading to hospital, so I guess the problem is solved. - end of transmission -



What are some stories/lessons you’ve learned from a Vietnam veteran that stuck with you?







