Snapshot · Dwarkesh Podcast
Despite all historical automation, prime-age employment in 2026 is the second highest ever recorded, surpassed only by the 2000 peak — a fact David Ricardo would have found shocking.
Where this was said
At 4:35 · chapter starts 0:00
Dwarkesh introduces Alex Imas and Phil Trammell. They explore labor share stability, the relational sector, the Mongolian economist thought experiment, and whether human intrinsic goods can survive automation. [1] — Alex Imas "Scarcity after AGI will concentrate in goods where human involvement is intrinsically part of the value — not just because humans are capab…" 00:44
Scarcity after AGI will concentrate in goods where human involvement is intrinsically part of the value — not just because humans are capable, but because consumers actively prefer the human to be in the loop. The hypothesis only holds if willingness-to-pay survives replacement, and we currently lack the data to know.
Ricardo correctly predicted that industrial-era jobs would be automated. He completely failed to predict that new jobs would replace them, and that prime-age employment in 2026 would be near an all-time high. The lump-of-labor fallacy has fooled experts for two centuries — and may be fooling them again.
The main U.S. database tracking job tasks has rarely been updated and is of very low quality, making it nearly impossible to track which jobs are being created or destroyed by automation.
Despite every wave of automation since the Industrial Revolution, labor's share of GDP has remained above 60%, which economists call a Kaldor fact — almost suspiciously stable.
A Mongolian economist in 1400 predicting scarcity would have assumed people satiate in horses and yogurt and concentrate spending on singers. They would have been wrong — because wealth expansion always generates new varieties. The same failure awaits anyone predicting AGI scarcity by holding varieties fixed.
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