Economists watching A.I.: an open letter, and an edited version

My sense is that many economists are optimistic about the long term development of A.I., while being cautious about some of the shorter term transitions that it will initiate. (This is a different set of worries than the species-extinguishing fears that can also be heard.)

Yesterday an open letter was published, signed by many economists: 

We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy 

1. AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

2. This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame. It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.

3. Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society.

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Here's the coverage from Stanford:

Stanford Digital Economy Lab / July 13, 2026  “We Must Act Now”: Sixteen Nobel Laureates Join Leading Economists and AI Researchers in Call to Prepare for AI’s Economic Transformation

"STANFORD, Calif. – July 13, 2026 – Today, a group of leading economists and AI researchers, including sixteen Nobel Laureates, released “We Must Act Now: A Statement on AI’s Transformation of the Economy,” calling for urgent preparation for the economic impacts of radically more powerful AI.

The statement, organized by economists Erik Brynjolfsson, Ajay Agrawal, Anton Korinek, and Tom Cunningham, warns that increasingly capable AI systems could reshape the economy at unprecedented speed. While AI offers enormous opportunities to improve productivity and living standards, it also raises important questions for workers, firms, and public institutions.

The statement calls on economists, policymakers, and technology leaders to deepen research on AI’s economic impacts and to begin building the policies and institutions needed to ensure AI complements human capabilities and benefits society.

“AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic implications. In that gap lie the greatest opportunities of our era. We must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than simply imitate them — and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, the Jerry Yang and Akiko Yamazaki Professor at Stanford University and Director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab.

“The scale, scope, and speed of the advances in AI, combined with a high level of uncertainty about the magnitude and timing of the impacts across many parts of the economy, call for an ‘all hands on deck’ approach to steering AI in beneficial directions,” said Michael Spence, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus at New York University.

“I’m so happy to join other leading experts in calling for the urgent need to redirect AI so that its risks are minimized and it can work for the benefit of workers and society,” said Daron Acemoglu, Nobel Laureate and Institute Professor at MIT.

“Steam, electricity, and computers each gave societies decades to adapt; AI may give us only a few years. We cannot improvise our strategy and institutions in the middle of the transformation; waiting for certainty means arriving too late,” said Anton Korinek, Professor at the University of Virginia, currently on leave at Anthropic.

“Whether rapidly advancing AI broadly elevates global living standards or severely concentrates wealth is not predetermined; it depends on how we choose to re-architect our political and economic systems today. We cannot afford to wait for the full transformation to arrive and in the meantime rely on institutional scaffolding that was optimized for a pre-high-fidelity-prediction world,” said Ajay Agrawal, Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

“We are driving in the fog, and it is extraordinarily difficult to anticipate what will happen next. It’s the right time for a coordinated effort to bring clarity to a confusing situation.” said Tom Cunningham, Researcher at METR.

The statement has been signed by more than 200 economists and AI researchers from leading universities and AI research organizations around the world. The full statement and the current list of signatories are available at http://wemustactnow.ai/." 

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Here's the story in the NYT:

Nearly 200 Economists and Tech Leaders Warn of A.I. Threats
A letter calls for policymakers to do more to understand and respond to potential disruptions from artificial intelligence. 
By Ben Casselman

"“A.I. may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” the researchers wrote in a statement released on Monday, adding that the technology “could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.”

"The statement, titled “We Must Act Now,” was signed by nearly 200 people, including 15 Nobel laureates and the chief economists of two of the leading A.I. labs, Open AI and Anthropic. Other notable signatories include Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic; Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive of Google; and Vinod Khosla, a prominent venture capitalist." 

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And here's an edited version of the letter, that I also like. (Inevitably, when you're asked to sign open letters, they don't read exactly as you would have written them yourself. (Even if you are one of the main authors of an open letter, it may reflect compromises that were required to reach consensus among your constituency.) 

Why I Didn't Sign the AI Open Letter: Instead, I edited it. by Andrew McAfee 

Here's his version (the big change is in item 3; his explanation is at the link):

1. AI is likely to become radically more powerful over the next 10 years.

2. Like previous world-changing technologies, AI will bring major gains in living standards. But it will also bring new risks, harms, and disruptions. And because of its extraordinarily fast improvement, AI’s benefits and shocks might come quickly.

3. So economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI, and to build the capabilities needed to respond quickly and effectively to the challenges it will bring.

 

 

Why markets fail — and how to fix them, a conversation about market design, among Scott Kominers, Tim Roughgarden and Al Roth

 I've now been the guest on many podcasts, aimed at many different kinds of listeners. This is the one for people with an academic interest in market design as a growing part of economics (as well as Scott Kominers' academic origin story, and an inside joke about a colleague at HBS:)

Why markets fail — and how to fix them, a conversation among Scott Kominers, Tim Roughgarden and Al Roth 

 

Why markets fail — and how to fix them (ft. Nobel economist Alvin Roth)
22.7K subscribers
Jul 10, 2026
Long before crypto made coordination programmable, Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth was designing markets where coordination could save lives.

In this episode of First Principles, Roth tells the story of how he helped build systems for some of the hardest matching problems in the world, from where doctors train and where students go to school to how kidney donors can reach the patients who need them.

He joins Tim Roughgarden, Head of Research at a16z crypto, and Scott Kominers — Harvard Business School professor, a16z crypto research partner, and one of Roth’s former students — for a conversation about how market design moves from theory into the real world.

They explore how economic theory becomes practical engineering, whether that's matching riders to Ubers, doctors to medical residencies, students to New York City high schools, or organ donors to people whose lives depend on it. They also cover how these same problems show up in today’s crypto networks. 

Roth explains why markets are not just natural forces, but engineered systems; why the details of timing, congestion, incentives, and trust can make or break a marketplace; and why some of the most important markets are the ones where simply exchanging money can’t do the work.

This is a conversation about economics at its most practical and profound: how to design systems that coordinate people, solve real problems, and sometimes save lives.

00:00 Intro: Why market design matters
04:18 The economist as engineer
08:09 When theory meets the real world
07:02 Fixing the medical residency match
15:32 Why markets unravel
18:22 Redesigning NYC high school admissions
28:05 The hidden problem of congestion
34:47 How kidney exchange saves lives
45:26 How the internet changed market design
48:25 Airbnb, Uber and smarter marketplaces
51:28 Repugnant transactions and moral economics
53:32 When markets need social support
54:32 The unexpected effects of criminalizing surrogacy
01:04:58 Preference signals and the job market 01:18:53 A broken market: resettling refugees and other migrants
 

Hear more from: Tim Roughgarden:   / tim_roughgarden   Scott Kominers:   / skominers   Follow a16z crypto: X:   / a16zcrypto   LinkedIn:   / posts   YouTube:    / @a16zcrypto   Substack: https://a16zcrypto.substack.com/subsc...

The enemy in the war on drugs is no longer agriculture, but chemistry

 One drug future may be happening first in Estonia, hard on the Russian border.

The NYT has the story :

Estonia Won the War on Fentanyl. What Came Next Was Even Worse.
By 2018, fentanyl overdoses in Estonia had plummeted. But powerful new drugs are appearing fast, with the authorities racing to respond.  By Azam Ahmed

“We wish we still had a fentanyl problem,” said Raigo Aas, the chief prosecutor for organized crime in Estonia.

"The first new drugs to arrive, known as nitazenes, sent mortality rates skyrocketing again, proving even more addictive and harder to treat or quit. New varieties keep popping up, too, some more than 40 times stronger than fentanyl.

...

"Exceedingly powerful substances are being churned out with such speed that the agencies created to stop them are baffled, racing to keep up. 

...

"Just as science has made plastics, medicines and foods phenomenally more varied and abundant, it has revolutionized illicit substances. Once grown in the soil, dependent on rain, sun and crop cycles, illicit drugs today are increasingly formulated in laboratories, with very few constraints.

"And with each iteration, the drugs grow more terrifying. It’s not just the overdoses and deaths they bring: Their incredible potency makes recovery much harder, deepening addiction and, by extension, the crisis it creates.

...

“We really thought the fentanyl period had taught us how to handle an opioid crisis,” said Kristin Mikko, a health coordinator in Estonia’s Ministry of Social Affairs. But the new drugs, she said, are “something different. They are so much more lethal.” 

 

and this:

"Yet cychlorphine was so new at the time that it wasn’t even illegal yet in Estonia; the authorities couldn’t charge him for it. The drug didn’t become banned in Estonia until this past spring.

“It makes our work harder,” Rait Pikaro, a former drug police head, said of the constantly shifting drug landscape. “It never stops.” 

 

 

The Economics of Repugnant Transactions, with Felix Salmon on Slate

  Felix Salmon talked to me about Moral Economics:

Money Talks: The Economics of Repugnant Transactions, with Felix Salmon on Slate.

"Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth explains what we learn when markets are shaped by big ethical questions." 

Transcript here 

Here's one snippet: 

"Speaker A: You have a pretty long chapter on same sex marriage in the book where you go through the sort of legislative history both in various states and the country. And after, like reading so much of the history of this, I would say, like, this is so Slate, I’m going to just come out and say that 95% plus of our listeners are perfectly fine with same sex marriage. It seems perfectly normal to us. It’s kind of hard for us to imagine why it was that we ever had a problem with it in the first place. But you went back, you Were looking at a bunch of contemporaneous literature. Do you have a sympathy for the anti side of the debate? Do you see where they were coming from?

Speaker B: Well, I think I see where they were coming from. I can do that without having necessarily a lot of sympathy for them. But they were tooled up quite early on. So for a long time in the United States, there were laws against sex that sometimes had the names unnatural acts in them. And in California, and I’m going to fudge the dates now, but sometime in the 1970s, long before there was any same sex marriage, they decided that laws against same sex sex violated the equal rights provisions of the California constitution. And so they changed them. They made those laws unconstitutional. And almost immediately after, like two years after, in the 1970s, the California legislature passed a law against same sex marriage. That is, the people who were looking into the far future and thinking that they really hated same sex marriage had felt protected by the laws against consensual sex between adults of, you know, say, sodomy. And all of a sudden they felt unprotected. So long before any same sex marriage became legal in the United States, there started to be laws against it.

Speaker A: That’s kind of wild. You’re just, you’re sort of like cutting it off at the past. It’s not legal anywhere. No one’s even trying to make it legal. We’re going to make it illegal just in case. And we saw that at the federal level as well.

Speaker B: Absolutely. When the state of Massachusetts finally, when its courts finally legalized same sex marriage in Massachusetts, the federal government passed a law called the defense of marriage act, which was intended to defend marriage against same sex marriage. So that’s a really unusual state of affairs. And again, when I say that’s a repugnant transaction, One of the things I emphasize in the book is I don’t mean that I disapprove of it or that you should, but that some people do. And the long political fight makes it clear that the people who objected to it objected very strongly. 

Speaker A: I mean, I was around for a lot of these court cases and legislative moves, but even at the time, I didn’t entirely understand where the opponents were coming from. So is it mostly like a biblical thing?

Speaker B: So I think it’s partly a religious thing and some of that is biblical. There were some passages in Hebrew Bible even that could be interpreted as disapproving of same sex relations. And when you look back at the long history of humanity, there were lots of taboos about sex. And I think one way to think of them is, for most of human history, sex between a man and a woman often resulted in pregnancy, and pregnancy often resulted in a live birth in a baby. And society has and had some interest in making sure that babies were taken care of. And one way to do that is to say babies should be born into families, and therefore before people have sex, they should be married to each other. And so there are a whole set of taboos that might be thought of as society’s way of trying to take care of babies. But of course, technology changes. And contraception, reliable contraception, means that it’s possible to have sex without too much risk of a baby. In vitro fertilization, IVF means that it’s possible to have babies without sex. So all of a sudden, some of those barriers that may have seem essential to the orderly running of society didn’t seem so essential. And I think that opened up room for us to think more about who could have sex with whom and who could form a family with whom. 

What crops compete with wine grapes? (Spoiler, it's houses.)

 As the wine business faces headwinds, both from climate change and from reduction in American alcohol consumption, vineyards are changing hands.  What is the new crop?  Houses...

The Mercury News has the story:

Housing plans in pricey Saratoga get lift from $100 million-plus deal
Homes are slated to be built on site of century-old vineyard By George Avalos

"The group bought the land in June 2025 for $30.6 million and embarked on a process to secure approval for a residential project on the property, which began operating as a vineyard around 1920.

Initially, the Wilson-led group proposed a 231-unit project known as Vineyard One at the corner of Chester Avenue and Allendale Avenue.

A series of negotiations with Saratoga planners and leaders eventually downsized the project to the current proposal that envisions a 64-unit housing development.

Of the 64 homes, 52 will be single-family residences for sale and 12 will be accessory dwelling units. Six of the ADUs will be rented to very low-income households, and six will be rented to moderate-income households, planning files show. 

...

"The purchase and development plans have materialized at a time when the median price of a home in Saratoga is around $3.9 million, far higher than the California median price of $930,260 and the Santa Clara County median home price of $1.6 million, according to Redfin. 

Origins and Consequences of the Trump Administration’s Humanitarian, Refugee, and Immigration Policies, by Kerwin, Carlson and Wheeler in J. Migration and Human Security

 Read it and weep:(

The Origins, Consequences, and Uncertain Legacy of the Trump Administration’s Humanitarian, Refugee, and Immigration Policies: A Comprehensive Analysis, Journal on Migration and Human Security, by 
Donald Kerwin, Elizabeth Carlson, and Charles Wheeler  

"Executive Summary: This paper documents and analyzes the origins, consequences, and uncertain legacy of the second Trump administration’s humanitarian assistance, refugee, and immigration policies. Its first section introduces the administration’s signature policies, which both build upon and sharply depart from those of recent administrations, Republican and Democratic. Its second section recounts how nativist language and tropes centered Donald Trump’s rise and return to power, and how they inform the administration’s refugee and immigration agenda. Its third section discusses the laws and jurisprudence that laid the groundwork for these policies. It outlines the growth in immigration enforcement spending and authorities over multiple presidencies. In addition, it highlights the first Trump administration’s refugee and immigration policies, and describes the sweeping executive orders (EOs) that inaugurated the second Trump administration. The fourth section examines the legal theories offered in support of the administration’s policies, how they have fared in U.S. courts, and the effects of these policies on targeted populations, U.S. families, businesses, and communities. The fifth section sets forth several themes that unify these policies:
•    A highly selective and instrumental view of the rule of law.
•    Cruelty as a guiding principle and strategy.
•    Hostility to programs and policies intended to benefit the poor and persecuted, regardless of their status.
•    The failure to address neuralgic problems in the U.S. immigration system or to pursue humanitarian, refugee, and legal immigration policies that serve the nation’s values, needs, and interests.
 

"The paper urges a return to fundamental American values and commitments. It concludes with detailed recommendations to guide the development of strengthened and integrated U.S. humanitarian, refugee, asylum, and immigration policies. "

 

And, from the introduction:

"President George Washington hoped the fledgling nation would become a “safe & agreeable Asylum to the virtuous & persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong” (Washington 1788). The Trump administration indefinitely suspended, dismantled, and brought to a virtual standstill the U.S. refugee resettlement program. This program revitalized U.S. communities, saved more than three million lives, offered hope to desperate persons throughout the world, and enhanced the nation’s standing (Kerwin and Nicholson 2021). The administration also vowed to review the cases of and re-interview refugees admitted under the Biden administration, and to suspend consideration of applications for lawful permanent resident (LPR) status by refugees and their family members who entered during this period (American Immigration Lawyers Association [AILA] 2025). Its subsequent Operation Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening (“Operation PARRIS”) entailed warrant-less entries, searches, apprehensions, detention in abusive conditions, and extreme vetting of already vetted and resettled refugees.¹

The second Trump administration also foreclosed legal access to the United States by asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border, suspended adjudication of pending asylum applications, terminated the removal proceedings of asylum-seekers (placing them in expedited removal), and removed many to perilous conditions (Human Rights First and RAICES [HRF and RAICES] 2026, 3, 10, 17).

Past administrations supported time and place restrictions on access to the U.S. asylum system, particularly in response to large numbers of border crossers, but no administration (prior to the Trump administration) made “physical presence” in the United States “a prerequisite” to seeking asylum at a U.S. port-of-entry.² As an additional barrier to pursuing an asylum claim, the administration imposed multiple fees on asylum-seekers (a first) and increased fees for temporary status on humanitarian grounds,³ To address the high volume of pending asylum cases, the administration could have taken steps to remedy the conditions displacing so many people and it could have built the infrastructure to adjudicate asylum cases expeditiously and fairly. It did not take either of these steps.

The administration also stripped temporary protected status (TPS) and humanitarian parole from an estimated 1.5 to 1.6 million persons (Bustillo and Martinez-Beltrán 2025c; Figueroa 2025). In doing so, it subjected legally present residents to deportation and possible return to their own troubled nations or to third countries where they had no ties and faced multiple perils. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has targeted, among other groups, beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, who arrived in the country as children (García 2026). It has detained persons who should never have been placed in removal proceedings, such as those with pending visa petitions and humanitarian parole (HRF and Raices 2026, 5). While properly credited with reducing illegal migration, by one estimate the administration has cut 2.5 times more legal than illegal entries (Bier 2026a). The former includes asylum seekers, refugees, immigrant (permanent) visa recipients, and temporary visa beneficiaries, such as the spouses and fiancés of U.S. citizens, international students, and workers (ibid.).

President Ronald Reagan (1989), channeling John Winthrop, called the United States a shining “city on the upon a hill . . . teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace,” a city with doors “open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” On January 14, 2026, the U.S. Department of State (DOS) announced it would pause visa processing from seventy-five countries, bringing to ninety-three the number of nations (a large number of them African) facing full or partial bars to admission (DOS 2026a; Bier 2026b). DOS (2026c) justified these bars as necessary to ensure that immigrants would not become a public charge or unlawfully use benefits (DOS 2026b). For legally present non-citizens, the administration has constructed a “paper wall” of administrative requirements and barriers that seek to prevent mostly low-income immigrants from advancing to permanent residence and citizenship."

Canada re-thinks medical aid in dying for psychiatric diseases

 A column in the Washington Post conveys the story:

With 76,475 dead, Canada appears to find its line on euthanasia
A parliamentary committee recommends against expanding it to psychiatric patients. By Charles Lane

 "In the decade since Canada legalized euthanasia, known there as medical assistance in dying, or MAID, its physician-assisted death regime has developed into one of the most permissive in the world. Between 2016 and 2024, 76,475 Canadians received lethal doses from doctors or nurse practitioners. The 16,499 cases in 2024 accounted for 1 out of 20 deaths in Canada. In some regions of Quebec, the rate is 13 out of 100. 

"Now, however, Canada might finally be maxing out on MAID. On June 17, a special parliamentary committee recommended that the government “indefinitely exclude” patients whose only medical condition is a psychiatric one such as depression or schizophrenia. Pro-euthanasia activists had urged that MAID eligibility be expanded to include them, but “safe and equitable implementation” of MAID in such cases is simply not possible, the committee said.

... 

"The committee also took the testimony of doctors from the Netherlands, one of two countries (Belgium is the other) where psychiatric euthanasia has long been allowed as part of a broader MAID regime — and where it has recently gone from rare exception to troublingly frequent occurrence. Nearly 850 people have received lethal injections for psychiatric suffering there since 2020, including teenagers as young as 16.

In fact, at roughly the same time as the Canadian commission issued its report, the Dutch themselves were tapping the brakes on psychiatric euthanasia. The Netherlands’ main professional organization for psychiatrists has issued new guidelines requiring stricter prior scrutiny for euthanasia requests." 

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 Here is the Canadian parliamentary report:

MEDICAL ASSISTANCE IN DYING AND MENTAL DISORDER AS THE SOLE UNDERLYING MEDICAL CONDITION: A COMPLEX AND CHALLENGING CONVERSATION AMONG CANADIANS
Report of the Special Joint Committee on Medical Assistance in Dying
Hon. Yonah Martin and Marcus Powlowsk, Co-chairs.

"Ultimately, the committee makes the following recommendation:
Recommendation 1
That the Government of Canada amend the Criminal Code to indefinitely exclude persons whose sole underlying medical condition is a mental illness from eligibility for medical assistance in dying. "