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200 economists sign AI jobs letter
The letter warns of potentially millions of lost white-collar jobs and calls for a plan to offset them. Signers include the chief economists of both OpenAI and Anthropic, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.
Its argument is that over a long enough view, those who expect AI to lift productivity are correct: new jobs and new sectors that nobody thinks about today will appear. The problem it names is the stretch between today and that future, when the transition is expected to be rocky and needs to be managed.
How have past technologies reshaped jobs?
In 1900, roughly 40 percent of American workers were employed on farms, according to US Department of Agriculture and Census figures. By 2000 the share was under 2 percent. Tractors and other machinery cut farm labor while factories and offices created work that had not existed before. The shift took about a century.
Why is the transition period the hard part?
Economic historian Robert Allen coined the term Engels' pause for Britain from roughly 1780 to 1840, when output per worker rose sharply while real wages barely moved. Profits rose first, and workers' wages caught up only decades later. The pause is named for Friedrich Engels, who documented the conditions of Manchester workers in a book published in 1845.
How do governments help displaced workers?
The US created Trade Adjustment Assistance in 1962 to give retraining and income support to workers who lost jobs to imports. Unemployment insurance, set up by the Social Security Act of 1935, replaces part of lost wages for a limited time. Denmark's flexicurity system pairs easy hiring and firing with generous benefits and retraining.
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