#labor-economics

#labor-economics

In 1798, Thomas Malthus looked at deer and saw doom. In nature, he noted, unchecked populations grow until they consume everything: deer overgraze the forest, starve, die off. He believed humans would follow the same curve, and he predicted the population would always outpace food supply, triggering famine, war and collapse. The math was clean - the logic brutal - and for a while, it all seemed inevitable. Except it never happened. Instead of famine, we got fertilizers and ever-growing crop yields.

The weirdest thing of all in economics, says Brandeis University Economics Professor Benjamin Shiller, is that weirdness is closely tied to fate in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The weirder you are, he tells Fortune, the better off you'll be. In his new book " AI Economics: How Technology Transforms Jobs, Markets, Life, and Our Future," Shiller, argues that the more bizarre your job, the less likely that AI will take it.

"When...ChatGPT came along, we were all very mesmerized by how powerful it is, how much work it does," said Wei Jiang, professor of finance at Emory University, in a phone interview with The Register. "So we, like other people, anticipated if AI is doing our work, we can work less. And I just find myself actually working longer. So I checked with a few friends, and every one of them says, 'Hey, we're actually working longer.'"

B.L.S. employees conduct monthly surveys of sixty thousand households and a hundred and twenty-one thousand employers to compile critical economic statistics.

"AI's impact on the labor market remains limited and there is no sign of a significant impact on most labor market outcomes."