Danoff Dean of @Harvard College, Professor of Economics @Kennedy_School forklightning.substack.com thecontextwindowpodcast.subs…
Cambridge, MA
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David Deming retweeted
This is so true. I said it differently, but it was a major theme of my book WTF.
I am pretty sure that @AndreyFradkin and Seth Benzell interviewed David Deming just for my entertainment and benefit. Here’s the key passage that I’ve been wandering around meetings and dinner parties in NYC thinking about over the last two days:
> If we have much more free time, perhaps the most important thing we’ll do is argue about what the big AI system should be doing for us...
> As societies become richer, we devote more time to relational work and to exchanging opinions.
> We spend vastly more time firing takes at each other partly because very little of modern work is strictly necessary for human survival.
> When people say, “AI is going to lead to the end of work,” I sometimes think: it’s already here. Most of us are entertainers.
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My guest on The Context Window today is @jasonfurman, former chair of President @BarackObama's Council of Economic Advisors. We talked about what he learned in Washington, why inflation has stayed higher than expected, and what A.I. might mean for jobs, productivity, and the classroom.
piped.video/lM9fio7Ll90
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David Deming retweeted
Andrey Fradkin! David Deming! AI! The Coasean Singularity! Comparative Advantage! Work as entertainment and the last human skill…
A self-recommending podcast if there ever was one—overcast.fm/+ABMS6kb6piE
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Great update on an important question.
Has AI hit the labor market yet? @alexolegimas and my verdict after ~20 papers: not yet in aggregate. Unemployment and layoffs show almost nothing. But AI may already be cutting junior hiring in exposed white-collar jobs. Remote work may explain part of that decline.
A 🧵
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The red queen’s race continues
Introducing Emulate-1
A new undetectable AI model trained on how humans naturally write, removing AI slop and producing more authentic, human-sounding text.
I ran Emulate's outputs through Pangram, one of the stricter AI detectors. They came back as human nearly every time
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Thanks for having me @SBenzell @AndreyFradkin! This was a lot of fun.
In the latest episode of Justified Posteriors we interview top labor economist and Harvard Dean @ProfDavidDeming about social skills, AI and the future of Harvard.
One lens is RPGs skill-systems; David decomposes 'social skill' by ranking Charisma, Manipulation and Composure.
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David Deming retweeted
Today we're hosting the 2026 @OpenAI AGI Economy Conference where we and researchers from across academia and industry will bring their different areas of expertise about where we are and where we're going because of AI. 🧵
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I agree, it's a great book. The most interesting and under-discussed implication is that most passthrough biz income is human capital. Lots of implications for tax policy, learning-by-doing (human capital \neq schooling), x-country income diffs, etc. Bravo @omzidar and Eric!
Have been finding this book by @omzidar and Zwick pretty fascinating about where wealth is located around the US.
us.macmillan.com/books/97812…
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We need a guide to A.I. safety - but for normal people who are just starting to pay attention to the issue. That’s how I pitched this episode of The Context Window to @mattyglesias, and it did not disappoint.
I asked Matt why A.I. safety is suddenly getting so much attention, how seriously we should be taking the risks of superintelligent A.I., and how we could realistically slow things down with China also racing for the lead.
piped.video/302dn5mAX6Y
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David Deming retweeted
New paper with @BKleinTeeselink!
Measuring AI adoption and employment changes across 41 countries. This is some of the first evidence on global changes in labor markets from AI.
Paper and Substack explainer + lit review at bottom of 🧵
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David Deming retweeted
Some of the return to education is due to people accumulating skills, while some is due to signaling the skills you have. But how much can we attribute to each? This paper has a clever approach that, unlike basically everything thus far, can actually answer this at all! 1/
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David Deming retweeted
Today we are announcing the new DeepMind Institute, a forum dedicated to interdisciplinary, evidence-led debate on the societal and economic questions surrounding AGI.
As part of the launch, @JulianDJacobs and I have a new essay and working paper: “Economic Policy for AGI.”
bit.ly/economic-policy-for-A… 🧵1/n
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@GinaRaimondo @raiseus_ai gave me homework: design a tax incentive for companies to invest in people in an AI economy.
I took her up on it and share a proposal for a tax credit for hire career starters and switchers.
New episode of The Context Window out today. Link in the reply.
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David Deming retweeted
Today @Google, we published work led by @m_codreanu on AI in Science, drawing on 15 million Gemini interactions, 2,600 specialised AI models & a 600-scientist survey. What did we find about how AI is changing science? Read on...
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David Deming retweeted
My p(doom) is low because I expect society to act. Now we need to get concrete:
1. Build AI models that can reliably audit other AI.
2. Recruit independent auditors with diverse perspectives.
3. Give them incentives to catch real dangers without blocking everything.
4. Address the cyber threats already hitting society and politics.
5. Get universities in the game—and moving faster.
These are huge opportunities to get researchers working on these problems and directly participating in oversight.
I wrote my thoughts on this here:
freesystems.substack.com/p/t…
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