Robert D. Atkinson

@MilkRoadAI @SawyerMerritt You must be a Luddite.

@SawyerMerritt x.com/MilkRoadAI/sta… Good move by Bezos!

NEWS: Jeff Bezos is in talks to raise $100 billion for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation. It's linked to Jeff's Project Prometheus AI startup, which aims to build AI products for engineering and manufacturing in fields like computers, aerospace and automobiles. (via WSJ)

Share Polling as Propaganda: How Blue Rose Research’s AI Survey Misleads @blueroseorg policyarena.org/p/polling-as-p…

@Sherman1890 @PGunigantiAT @ezraklein @DKThomp Higher output has always benefited consumers and workers and always will. If this were not true, profits would be higher than they were 50 years ago.

@PGunigantiAT @ezraklein @DKThomp isn't abundance basically a macro- concept? Antitrust is all about micro-, looking only at output in specific markets. e.g, a "relevant market" is just partial equilibrium analysis. There is an underlying faith that higher output favors consumers and workers across the economy.

I 100% agree that *antitrust* isn’t in opposition to abundance. As @Sherman1890 notes, output metrics for competition are well established in antitrust caselaw. But the antimonopoly movement says these are the wrong metrics. Maybe why @ezraklein @DKThomp see *it* as opposed. 1/

@PeterDiamandis Peter shall we bet that AI joblessness will be minimal

The transition from UBI to UHI is a race. Can the deflationary wave arrive before the social fracture becomes irreparable? Can we create Abundance (collapse the cost of basic needs) before the valley of desperation destabilizes the political conditions for the transition to complete? Call for brilliant ideas... Soon.

@PeterDiamandis Assume a can opener, as the economist joke goes. I assume reality, Peter..

If You're an Entrepreneur: Stop designing businesses for 2024 scarcity. Design for 2030 abundance. Assume intelligence is free, energy is unlimited, and robotic labor costs pennies per hour. What becomes possible that's impossible today?

@ZichenWanghere @ForeignPolicy It’s like when the CCP says they want a win-win, meaning China wins twice. Terrible idea to let Chinese companies take over the US market

My op-ed in Foreign Policy @ForeignPolicy timed for the China-U.S. trade and economic talks in Paris came out last night: ‘Made in America’ Should Accept Chinese Investment Private Chinese capital is being locked out of mutually beneficial opportunities.

ITIF has 2 great positions open: 1) AI policy and 2) industrial strategy. No better place for a pragmatic and independent-thinking analyst to make a policy difference. Go to our web site and click on jobs

@JigarShahDC @Revkin I think the definition of efficiency is total cost and we are not there yet for electrons

@tonyannett @davidjlynch Not when you include the need for non-intermittency. Can’t power a city on solar alone.

Renewables are now the cheapest form of energy in electricity generation. People who claim otherwise still think it’s 2010…

Why UBI is an unbelievably bad idea policyarena.org/p/ubi-unbeliev…

@RockChartrand @ZachMottl I want UBI so I can have freedom

You’re not “forced” to sell your labor to capitalists. You’re free to start a business, work for yourself, form a partnership, join a co-op, or trade your skills however you choose. What they’re really objecting to is something much older than capitalism: the fact that humans must produce in order to live. Food doesn’t grow itself. Homes don’t build themselves. Someone has to create what people consume. Capitalism didn’t create that reality. It simply allows people to cooperate through voluntary trade instead of being ordered around by a ruler or a central planner. Calling that “coercion” confuses the necessity of working to survive with someone forcing you to work for them, which are not the same thing at all.

@TheDragonFeeder @ScottPaulAAM We agree. itif.org/publications/2…

Beijing works in cunning & nefarious ways… #Tesla We should NOT allow #BYD into the US market! We MUST protect our national security interests!!

@andrew_lautz @CoreyHusak @amprog Housing is capitalized consumption. It is not investment and so expensing is a terrible idea. No need for subsidies. Just fix zoning

Thoughtful and interesting proposal from @CoreyHusak and @amprog to extend full and immediate expensing to multifamily housing. americanprogress.org/article/1-simp…

@ForeignAffairs What’s the alternative. Continued US competitiveness declined view of each China. So yes muscular intervention is what’s needed. You need to be focused on encouraging that to be effective intervention not simply opposing it.

Jami Miscik, Peter Orszag, and Theodore Bunzel discuss the rise of a new form of state capitalism—and warn that “policymakers keen on muscular intervention today must tread carefully.” foreignaffairs.com/united-states/…

@SanderTordoir @70sBachchan A shock implies serendipity. Second attack is more accurate

Second China shock to Europe in full motion. Europes policy response is weak, fragmented and haphazard. Buckle up.

If you want to understand why AI will not cause a job problem read the answers given by AI to whether it will cause a job problem. international-economy.com

@pawtrammell @dwarkesh_sp Wages are not determined by demand but by productivity

@RobAtkinsonITIF @dwarkesh_sp We don’t make the lump of labor fallacy at all. Everything we say is totally compatible with demand for labor rising and thus wages rising.

New blog post w @pawtrammell: Capital in the 22nd Century Where we argue that while Piketty was wrong about the past, he’s probably right about the future. Piketty argued that without strong redistribution of wealth, inequality will indefinitely increase. Historically, however, income inequality from capital accumulation has actually been self-correcting. Labor and capital are complements, so if you build up lots of capital, you’ll lower its returns and raise wages (since labor now becomes the bottleneck). But once AI/robotics fully substitute for labor, this correction mechanism breaks. For centuries, the share of GDP that goes to paying wages has been 2/3, and the share of GDP that’s been income from owning stuff has been 1/3. With full automation, capital’s share of GDP goes to 100% (since datacenters and solar panels and the robot factories that build all the above plus more robot factories are all “capital”). And inequality among capital holders will also skyrocket - in favor of larger and more sophisticated investors. A lot of AI wealth is being generated in private markets. You can’t get direct exposure to xAI from your 401k, but the Sultan of Oman can. A cheap house (the main form of wealth for many Americans) is a form of capital almost uniquely ill-suited to taking advantage of a leap in automation: it plays no part in the production, operation, or transportation of computers, robots, data, or energy. Also, international catch-up growth may end. Poor countries historically grew faster by combining their cheap labor with imported capital/know-how. Without labor as a bottleneck, their main value-add disappears. Inequality seems especially hard to justify in this world. So if we don’t want inequality to just keep increasing forever - with the descendants of the most patient and sophisticated of today’s AI investors controlling all the galaxies - what can we do? The obvious place to start is with Piketty’s headline recommendation: highly and progressively tax wealth. This might discourage saving, but it would no longer penalize those who have earned a lot by their hard work and creativity. The wealth - even the investment decisions - will be made by the robots, and they will work just as hard and smart however much we tax their owners. But taxing capital is pointless if people can just shift their future investment to lower tax countries. And since capital stocks could grow really fast (robots building robots and all that), pretty soon tax havens go from marginal outposts to the majority of global GDP. But how do you get global coordination on taxing capital, when the benefits to defecting are so high and so accessible? Full automation will probably lead to ever-increasing inequality. We don’t see an obvious solution to this problem. And we think it’s weird how little thought has gone into what to do about it. Many more thoughts from re-reading Piketty with our AGI hats on at the post in the link below.

World economic forum says we need a new growth model. Don’t believe them. policyarena.org/p/wef-thinks-t…

@guywardjackson @FT @InstituteGC @KeeganMcB The war is with China. Not the US

Excited to make it into @FT today. Europe needs to prepare for economic warfare, but not thwart its competitiveness along the way. ft.com/content/b514c8… Keep an eye out for future @InstituteGC work in this space from me and @KeeganMcB

@MazzucatoM Where does ILO say it went? They don’t. Most of the decline in US is because of rise in sole proprietors income and imputed rent of homeowners. I thought academics were supposed to be objective, not political advocates

If labour's share of global income had stayed at its 2004 level, workers would have received an additional US$2.4 trillion in 2024 alone. This isn't the inevitable result of technological change—it's a political choice about who shares in the risks and rewards of collective value creation. Delivering a keynote today at the @ILO Innovation Day (13:15 CET) on why innovation systems must be built on a new social contract between labour, state and market. Watch live ➡️ live.ilo.org