Jack Meyer 🏛️

I've been thinking about artificial intelligence and the job market a lot recently, so I wrote a piece on what I see as the most immediate economic threat posed by generative AI (and it's not automation).

“This easy,” you say. Really? Easy for who, exactly? What are we looking at here, an outfit? So called “prep propaganda”? And who is being propagandized to? The American people? You have to ask yourself, what’s really going on here?

For those wondering why public economic sentiment continues to deteriorate despite rising material living conditions:

Any push for nuclear at the expense of renewables investment is a bit strange given the largest barrier in most regions, at least in the US, is still unit economics

@tonyannett In spite of increasingly fragmented international trade oil deliberately remains one of the most liquid commodity markets. Domestic production capacity really isn't much of a buffer against a global price shock

This is completely ass backwards. First of all, oil is traded in global markets and has a global price. Second, gas markets are more segmented - cheap in US, expensive in Europe. Because of reliance on Russia! It’s renewables that will save Europe from the tyranny of Putin.

For people who explicitly choose a career in research, it's funny to see how eager some are to outsource aspect of research to AI.

Economists making their articles less readable as a way to signal they are not AI-generated is perfectly on brand. Incentives matter.

"In this paper we estimate the causal effect of national language on life satisfaction, identifying the 2025 Canadian federal election as a plausibly exogenous shock to the primary language spoken by the head of government"

I know it's surprising but I'm going to make the controversial claim that funding outlook is not great right now

Disheartening to think that on several running projects I've probably spent more time applying for funding than actually working on the research

@besttrousers @pmarca I was thinking there must be some unique intersection of common-pool resource management and open source autonomous bots I was not aware of

@Jackbmeyer @pmarca It's my quasi-regular attempt to get some sort of Ostrom-twitter identifier (based on her work in maine).

I cannot in good faith comment on the Andreessen introspection discourse, it would be short-sighted of me to alienate such an endeared follower before they have internalised the values of left-liberal institutionalism

@besttrousers @pmarca I don't know what the lobster means, so I'm going to say probably not

@Jackbmeyer @pmarca Are you, or have you ever been, a member of 🦞🦞🦞Twitter?

🚨 Visiting Faculty position @SFU Fields: Economic History, Political Economy, Development - Summer or 1-2 semesters in 2027-28 - Up to $55k stipend + $7.5k research support - Visa + moving support ⏰ Apply by May 4 🔗👇

A shame that this will destroy the robust US shipbuilding industry

Boom . There it is *TRUMP WAIVES JONES ACT IN BID TO CURB HIGH FUEL PRICES

@eltokh7 🫡

@Jackbmeyer Godspeed soldier

I am very happy that my survey paper, "Deep Learning for Solving Economic Models," is forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature (pending final replication checks, which should be quick). The paper benefited greatly from the editor, David Romer, five referees, and many friends who read earlier versions. I believe the result is a solid introduction to the field, though in 48 pages, there is only so much one can do. So, I created a companion webpage: sas.upenn.edu/%7Ejesusfv/dee… where you can find the paper, the code, and some slide decks with my teaching material. My plan is to expand the slides over time, adding new material and updating them as new results appear. I will probably do a thorough revision once the spring semester is over. Those who follow my feed know that I think deep learning is the most fundamental change to computational economics in the last 40 years. I am by now convinced it is more important than the development of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods in the early 1990s or the introduction of projection and perturbation methods in the 1980s. To find a comparable shift, one would probably need to go back to Richard Bellman's invention of value function iteration in 1957. More pointedly, we need to redesign the Ph.D. in economics. Not at the margin. From the ground up. Economists can either fully embrace the deep learning revolution or become irrelevant, as has already happened, I would dare say, to some fields in academia that refused to accept reality. Finally, let me apologize to everyone working in this area whom I could not cite. Space was a binding constraint. And yes, this post was written with the considerable help of AI. There is nothing I am prouder of than the fact that AI is now an integral part of every step I take in my professional life.

That's not to say this site no longer functions for networking, but between a significant chunk of the academic community leaving for other platforms and poor algorithm alignment burying article discussion and external links, the professional advantage of posting is far narrower

It’s interesting to consider the time and platform varying consequences of building a social media presence. I can’t help but think that had I started taking this site seriously a few years earlier, I would be better positioned to leverage my following for professional gain