For one thing, the macrodata isn’t matching the anecdata: The unemployment rate was 4.3 percent in March 2026; in March of 2020, it was 4.4 percent. Average hourly earnings are stable. Claude Code is a marvel, yet demand for software engineers is booming. Maybe mass layoffs are coming. But maybe not.
Economists, I’ve found, are quite skeptical that mass joblessness is on the horizon. In “What Will Be Scarce?,” Alex Imas, an economist at the University of Chicago, tries to clarify the mistake most A.I. discourse, in his view, makes. “The answer to any question about the future economics of advanced A.I. begins with identifying what becomes scarce,” Imas writes.
For most of human history, calories were scarce. Our energy went into finding or growing food. Agriculture steadily made food more plentiful and goods became scarce. Then goods were scarce; hand-me-down clothes were common and tools were expensive. Innovations in technology and manufacturing made goods cheaper. Then, technical knowledge became scarce: Doctors, lawyers and software engineers are paid high salaries because of the rarity of what they know. The fear is that A.I. will make knowledge plentiful; that it will turn the fruits of learning into a commodity as surely as manufacturing turned clothing into a commodity and industrial agriculture made strawberries commonplace.
But something is always scarce. People are looking at the economy as it exists and asking which tasks A.I. can do; they should be asking which jobs people won’t want A.I. doing, or which services A.I. will make us want more of.
Here is a poetic finding from econometrics: As the rich get richer, they want more from other humans, not less. They “shift their spending toward goods and services where the human element, the experience or the social meaning matters more,” Imas writes. They seek out clothing with a story, food with a provenance, doctors who make house calls, therapists who make them feel seen, tutors who know their children and personal trainers who work around their injuries. This, Imas says, is “the relational sector” of the economy, and it will explode. Instead of so many human beings working with computers, they will work with other human beings.
Source:
www.nytimes.com
