Robert D. Atkinson

@DEricSayers @SilveradoPolicy Then why did the USITC not ban BOE displays from import even as they acknoeldged they were based on stolen IP. Becuase US Trade remedy law is massively out of date

Important new report from @SilveradoPolicy “China is the leading global producer of display cells and is projected to account for 75 percent of display production capacity in 2028.” ‘Displays are essential for defense applications, consumer electronics, and U.S. manufacturing. As a result, any disruption in the U.S. display supply chain could lead to a reduction in production in major manufacturing sectors, such as U.S. auto production, or limit the ability of U.S. industry to produce goods critical to national security.” reuters.com/world/china/ta…

@jasminewsun the only way we get a permanent underclass is if we institute UBI

Most people I know in AI think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I spent the last 3 months talking to dozens of researchers, economists, and policy experts about AI's impact on work; including reps from every frontier lab and several Congressional offices. Unfortunately, I was not reassured. The AI industry is raising the alarm, but can't change course. These companies' core business model relies on the disruption they are warning about: their faith in full automation only makes them go faster. Policymakers are waking up, but still paralyzed by data and debates. Econ wonks disagree on plenty, but even the limited scenario looks like a "painful transition" that will disempower millions of workers. But an "underclass" is not inevitable, but rather a societal choice — and one we can and should stop. Instead of waiting for impact, we should start planning now to support workers through AI disruption. Whether policymakers can assuage concerns about economic security may determine if we get to reap AI's gains at all. New from me for @NYTOpinion. I put a ton into researching what I think may be the biggest topic of the year, so hope you read it (gift link here!) nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opi…

We need way more creative destruction, but we can and should do this with more compassion and help. Only a few countries get this balance right. US is not one, nor is most of EU, but for different reasons policyarena.org/p/creative-des…

@iam_elias1 ah peer reviewed. Must be right. Also, i have a bridge you might be interest in buying

Two economists just published a mathematical proof that AI will destroy the economy. Not might. Not could. Will — if nothing changes. The paper is called "The AI Layoff Trap." Published March 2, 2026. Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Boston University. Peer reviewed. Mathematically modeled. The conclusion is one sentence. "At the limit, firms automate their way to boundless productivity and zero demand." An economy that produces everything. And sells it to nobody. Here is how you get there. A company fires 500 workers and replaces them with AI. A competitor fires 700 to keep up. Another fires 1,000. Every company is behaving rationally. Every company is following the incentives correctly. And every company is building a trap for itself. Because the workers who were fired were also customers. When they lose their jobs faster than the economy can absorb them, they stop spending. Consumer demand falls. Companies respond by cutting costs — which means automating more workers — which means less spending — which means more falling demand — which means more automation. The loop has no natural exit. The researchers tested every proposed solution. Universal basic income. Capital income taxes. Worker equity participation. Upskilling programs. Corporate coordination agreements. Every single one failed in the model. The only intervention that worked: a Pigouvian automation tax — a per-task levy charged every time a company replaces a human with AI, forcing them to price in the demand they are destroying before they pull the trigger. No government has implemented this. No major economy is seriously discussing it. Meanwhile the numbers are already tracking the curve. 100,000 tech workers laid off in 2025. 92,000 more in the first months of 2026. Jack Dorsey fired half of Block's workforce and said publicly: "Within the next year, the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion." Nobody is doing anything wrong. Companies are following their incentives perfectly. That is exactly the problem. Rational behavior. At scale. Simultaneously. With no mechanism to stop it. Two economists built the math. The math leads to one place. Source: Falk & Tsoukalas · Wharton School + Boston University · arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20617

Akin to "vehicular fentanyl." @RobAtkinsonITIF warned of the risks of allowing Chinese automakers to sell their cheaper cars in the United States at #SAFESummit2026. The Department of War in recent weeks has approached U.S. automakers to help boost weapons production, echoing their roles during World War II. The U.S. auto industry is a critical industry, Dr. Atkinson said, and giving ground to Chinese automakers here at home due to their lower costs would be a "failure."

In Asia they throw Chinese spies in jail for a long while for corp espionage. IN US it’s a slap on the wrist wsj.com/tech/taiwan-co…

@SecScottBessent Maybe he should have a token American AI scientist to speak.

The United States is home to the most talented AI researchers in the world. Instead of harnessing American innovation, Senator Sanders is inviting foreign nationals to tell the United States how to regulate AI. It would be like channeling Hugo Chavez to get advice on how to run our economy—oh wait, the Senator from Vermont did that 20 years ago, too. The real threat to AI safety is letting any nation other than the United States set the global standard.

There can be good reasons to get off of fossil fuels, but increasing living standards is not one. Value-added per worker in the petroleum & coal industry is $835K per worker. It's just $152 in machinery (where wind turbines are)

@HaroldMeyerson & I don't agree with everything, but we agree that financial capitalism needs to be reformed. prospect.org/2026/04/27/war…

@TheWhizzAI Yeah, but the rest of as consumers do want AI to replace them.

🚨 BREAKING: Stanford and MIT just published the most unsettling AI paper of the year. The answers should terrify every manager in America. Workers don't want AI to replace them. But the gap between what workers want and what AI can already do is so large it doesn't matter what workers want. The AI industry has used one framing to calm the public for three years: "We are building tools that workers choose to use. Adoption is driven by worker preferences. Nobody is being forced out." A Stanford research team including economist Erik Brynjolfsson just audited that framing against reality. The framing didn't survive contact with actual workers. → 1,500 domain workers surveyed across 104 occupations → 844 specific tasks mapped and rated → AI expert capability assessments run against the same task list → Worker preferences for automation vs. augmentation directly measured Here are the numbers that define the gap: Tasks workers want AI to automate a small, specific subset of repetitive low-value work. Tasks AI is currently capable of automating a vastly larger set including core job functions. The gap between the two the zone where AI can replace workers whether workers consent or not. Occupations covered 104. Tasks measured 844. Countries represented US workforce only. Stop. That gap is the entire story. Workers want AI to handle scheduling, formatting, data entry the boring edges of their jobs. AI can already handle research, drafting, analysis, customer communication, code review, financial modeling the core of most knowledge jobs. Nobody asked for that. Nobody consented to that. The capability exists regardless. And here is what makes this a turning point in the policy debate. The researchers introduced something called the Human Agency Scale a formal measure of how much human involvement workers prefer for each task. For tasks at the center of their professional identity judgment calls, client relationships, creative decisions workers scored maximum human agency. For those exact same tasks, AI expert assessments showed near-complete automation capability already exists. The preference gap is widest exactly where it matters most. → The study was revised and updated as recently as February 2026. → It builds on the US Department of Labor's O*NET database the most comprehensive occupational data set in existence. → The WORKBank database it creates is now publicly available for researchers and policymakers. → Brynjolfsson the leading economist studying technology and labor is one of the co-authors. Workers built careers around tasks they are proud of. The capability to automate those tasks exists right now. The only thing standing between the current moment and mass displacement is the speed of corporate adoption. 2026 is the year that speed is accelerating. Who speaks for the workers in this gap? Drop it below. ↓

@CSIS @CSIS_Tech No. Process innovations are key. Doing more with less is how we get more

"The AI economy is still embryonic. In the progression, greater value from this new technology can be spurred from business models focused on innovation and not just process efficiency," writes CSIS's Yinuo Geng. More from @CSIS_Tech: csis.org/analysis/towar…

@floydmarinescu Wow. Did you ever take economics? Wages have gone up pretty much every year for the last 250 years.

Even with a basic income, working class people will *always* be trying to outrun the cost of living — no matter how productive we get. That's why we'll never solve poverty unless we tax and broadly share the rent of land.

Hey @WorldBankGroup , where is your real apology for being so wrong on industrial policy for so long. Cuz your recent report didn't cut. I know how hard it is for you to admit that neoclassical economics failed the developing world, but at least try. policyarena.org/p/world-bank-w…

If the Trump Admin really supported manufacturing it would not call for elimination of NIST's Manufacturing Extension Program. Too many people in the admin are small government Heritage-type liberatarians. appropriations.senate.gov/hearings/a-rev…

@mkratsios47 @RapidResponse47 I am shocked, shocked that the Chinese are engaged in IP theft of American technology.

The U.S. has evidence that foreign entities, primarily in China, are running industrial-scale distillation campaigns to steal American AI. We will be taking action to protect American innovation. These foreign entities are using tens of thousands of proxies and jailbreaking techniques in coordinated campaigns to systematically extract American breakthroughs. Foreign entities who build on such fragile foundations should have little confidence in the integrity and reliability of the models they produce. The U.S. government is committed to the free and fair development of AI technologies across a competitive ecosystem, from open-source to proprietary models. Read the memo: whitehouse.gov/wp-content/upl…

@scottlincicome Wake me when the get to 500 million

"the number of Chinese working age adults (here defined as being aged 20 to 69 years old) is projected to shrink by two-thirds over the course of this century. Two-thirds." ft.com/content/bbef92…

@BachmannRudi Yeah not having a dynamic growth economy is the ideal.

I think Europe should be proud not to be producing Elon Musks.

@pdmsero @BritishProgress Wrong question. Right question is AI boosting productivity and lowering prices

Is AI killing jobs? New data shows that, more than three years after the release of ChatGPT, there is no evidence for a significant impact of AI on overall employment in the UK. In our new report, we break down the labour force into different occupations and use four measures of AI exposure to determine how likely they are to be affected by the technology. Surprisingly, occupations with higher exposure to AI have grown faster than least-exposed ones, not slower. This holds across all four measures, and across two different data sources. The wage picture is different. Pay in AI-exposed occupations has lagged the rest of the labour market since 2019. But that gap opened three years before ChatGPT, which makes AI an unlikely candidate for the observed wage compression. This flattening of the wage structure is visible across the within-occupation distribution and strongest at the top quartile, which is consistent with labour market dynamics that predate generative AI.

@floydmarinescu Floyd you should know this is just plain wrong. There has been lots of empirical work explaining why the productivity wage graph is wrong

"Should we plan for the impact of AI to prevent another four decades lost for middle earners?" Automation is hollowing out the middle and polarizing the job market. It's why we should pay workers dividends from the proceeds of AI. thehill.com/opinion/financ…

@elonmusk Wow. Makes perfect sense. We clearly have enough money from somewhere to give people loads of $ but not enough money to fund federal science or AID

Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.