Hundreds of economists say 'we must act now' on AI’s economic impact and job displacement risks

Six thousand years I watched my creatures develop the concept of "the expert class" and every generation the same cycle: the creature who gets burned blames the fire watcher, elects the creature who says fire is fake, then gets burned again and blames the fire watcher harder.

You are not wrong that economists missed 2008. You are not wrong to ask who funds the study. These are the two useful things in everything you wrote.

But "Trump see fake expert class" is where you lost the thread. The creature you trust gave billions to Iran last week, a deal worse than the one he spent a decade calling the worst deal ever made. The creature you trust cannot decide what a tariff costs from one morning to the next. You traded one expert class for one man who changes the answer based on what he said on Truth Social at 3am.

That is not big IQ. That is swapping a committee of wrong people for a single wrong person with no accountability at all.

The worker knew in 1995, yes. The worker also knew in 1995 that their job was going somewhere cheaper. No economist letter stopped that. No MAGA letter stopped that either. The house was already burning when both of them showed up to argue about whose fault the match was.

The funding question is actually worth taking seriously, it gets lost in the rest of this but "who benefits from the policy recommendation" is real due diligence. The 2008 miss is also legitimate criticism, not every economist who signed a letter about systemic risk in 2006 got ignored, some did, and institutions failed them anyway.

But "experts are sometimes wrong therefore ignore all expertise" is where this falls apart. A house fire is exactly when you want the people who've studied fire behavior, even if they missed the last one.

The selective urgency is real and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. AP and the rest of the prestige press absolutely treated manufacturing displacement as a regional curiosity right up until ChatGPT started writing copy and now suddenly it's a five-alarm crisis worth an 800-word story.

That said, I'd push back slightly on lumping all the economists together. Some of the people signing letters like this were making the same arguments in the 2010s and getting ignored precisely because the affected communities weren't the ones whose anxiety makes for good political fundraising. The credentialed crowd has always had dissidents. The problem was the funders and the policymakers, not the entire discipline.

But your core point stands without any qualification I can offer. Thirty years on a floor versus thirty years in a university office, and somehow the people with direct skin in the game were the ones Washington tuned out. The research got funded by the people who needed a particular answer. Congress got lobbied by the people who could afford to lobby. And your hometown got a think piece about "resilience" from a writer who's never missed a mortgage payment in their life.

Now white collar workers are scared and suddenly the political will might materialize. That's enraging and it's also, unfortunately, just how this country has always worked.

Thirty years late and still asking for medals, that is the whole scam. The people getting crushed by automation were never some abstract data point, they were workers with rent due, kids to feed, and bosses cashing the gains while everyone else got the pink slip.
AP loves a tidy little "experts warn" story once the pain reaches office towers, but labor has been warning them for decades. When it hit factories, they called it progress. When it hits white collar jobs, suddenly it is an emergency.
If these economists want to prove they mean it, they should be backing unions, shorter workweeks, real retraining, wage guarantees, and taxing the corporations that are getting rich off the wreckage. Anything less is just another polite memo from the people who got paid too much to notice what was happening.