Daniel Lind

Food for thought! "Work, Wellbeing, and Choice: Empirical Lessons for AI Futures" by Stephanie C.Y. Chan, Adam Bales, Katherine L. Hermann, and Iason Gabriel. "Advances in AI-driven automation have raised questions about how humans might find wellbeing in a world where paid employment is less necessary or less available than before. Paid work has been variously characterized as both a contributor and an impediment to human wellbeing. What is already known about the relationship between paid work and wellbeing? What factors influence wellbeing among people who do not work—or who do not need to work? And how might these factors bear upon prospective AI-induced economic transformations? To help provide empirical grounding for these questions, we survey the psychological, sociological, and economic literature that investigates the relationship between wellbeing and work. We draw on evidence from multiple populations, including the unemployed, retirees, lottery winners, and financially dependent spouses. This comparative review draws from studies across OECD countries, China, India, and Gulf states. We identify three key factors that mediate the relationship between work status and wellbeing: (1) agency and choice—whether the exit from work is voluntary or involuntary, as well as longterm agency; (2) the availability of alternative sources of work’s latent benefits—such as volunteering, hobbies, or state-provisioned employment; and (3) social and systemic context—including cultural norms around work and the robustness of social safety nets. We draw on these three factors to derive specific implications for different AI automation scenarios, connecting the empirical evidence to concrete policy considerations." arxiv.org/pdf/2609.11019

Super interesting! "What is Work For? Labor, Politics, and Meaning in the Age of AI" by Julian Jacobs. "This paper investigates the role of work in providing a source of meaning, purpose, community, and other non-monetary benefits. Using an original cross-national survey of 8,234 working-age adults across the United Kingdom, United States, Denmark, and India, I study the factors that motivate people in their work, with an eye toward the potential future AI economic transformation. I find that 81% of respondents report being satisfied with their job, and a majority of people across all four countries are strongly motivated by the non-monetary components of their employment. Using an original “Work Values” Index, I show that one third of working respondents in our sample are motivated intrinsically by their job—valuing their role for its own sake. Nearly one quarter of respondents are driven by social and community-related aspects of their employment. A further 17% are driven by a feeling of social status. Just over one quarter of workers are motivated by the transactional financial benefits of their job. Although a majority of people would choose to leave their role if offered their current salary as a guaranteed income, one fifth of workers would choose to stay in their job even if offered up to 120% of their salary. Workers who are intrinsically motivated by their job were disproportionately likely to refuse a basic income at any substitution level. Groups attached to their job for non-monetary reasons were also more likely to pursue volunteering or work-like activities if they received guaranteed income substitution but could no longer perform their current role. Crucially, these non-monetary work motivations are evenly distributed across the income distribution and between white- and blue-collar workers. I argue that these findings have implications for managing the AI transition, understanding attitudes to AI, and making sense of policy preferences. Guaranteeing a basic income may indeed be necessary for managing any future AI labor shock, yet it could ultimately fail to compensate workers for any loss of the non-monetary benefits they derive from work." 1301f6a7-9521-4ab4-a3ca-2d62…

Food for thought! "Industrial policy in times of market power" by Domenico Delli Gatti, Roberta Terranova, and Enrico Maria Turco. "We explore the effects of different industrial policies in a macroeconomic agent-based model calibrated to reproduce the decline in US business dynamism over the last half-century. R&D subsidies to innovators raise GDP growth but exacerbate the trend toward rising market power, while financial subsidies to adopters and standard capital-replacement schemes have negligible aggregate effects. A meaningful reversal of market power emerges only when innovation support is paired with adoption-oriented measures that relax the knowledge constraints of small adopters, e.g. the establishment of a National Competence Center providing technology transfer and knowledge upgrading. The effectiveness of each policy is dependent on the underlying technological regime: the growth–dynamism trade-off is sharpest in science-based regimes and attenuated in scale-intensive and supplier-dominated ones." sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

Very valuable! "The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets" by Tito Boeri and Jan van Ours. link.amazon/B0fqyzmKg "The leading textbook on imperfect labor markets and the institutions that affect them: Today's labor markets are witnessing seismic changes brought on by such factors as rising self-employment, temporary employment, zero-hour contracts, and the growth of the sharing economy. This fully updated and revised third edition of The Economics of Imperfect Labor Markets reflects these and other critical changes in imperfect labor markets, and it has been significantly expanded to discuss topics such as workplace safety, regulations on self-employment, and disability and absence from work. Authoritative and accessible, this textbook examines the many institutions that affect the behavior of workers and employers in imperfect labor markets. These include minimum wages, employment protection legislation, unemployment benefits, family policies, equal opportunity legislation, collective bargaining, early retirement programs, and education and migration policies. Written for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students, the book carefully defines and measures these institutions to accurately characterize their effects, and discusses how these institutions are being transformed today." Olivier Blanchard: "Understanding the role of labor market institutions is a difficult but central task. Good institutions can alleviate the adverse effects of the many imperfections that characterize labor markets. But unfortunately bad institutions can, and often do, make things worse. By relying on simple theory and an accumulating body of careful evidence, this book helps us think straight. An essential read for anybody interested in going beyond clichés and understanding what institutions do and should do." link.amazon/B0fqyzmKg

Super interesting! "Winners and Losers: Competition, Creative Destruction, and Labor Income Risk" by Brice Green, Leonid Kogan, Dimitris Papanikolaou, and Lawrence D. W. Schmidt. "Using U.S. administrative data, we find that technology-driven creative destruction in the product market passes through to worker earnings. The passthrough to incumbent worker earnings is both asymmetric and concentrated: profit drops from rival innovations lead to proportionally greater earnings declines and changes in the likelihood of job destruction than profit gains from their own firm’s innovations, while top workers are significantly more exposed than the average worker. We develop an endogenous-growth model with monopsonistic labor markets and worker heterogeneity that replicates this asymmetry and the distribution of earnings risk. In the model, creative destruction exposes highincome workers to concentrated downside risk while increasing upward mobility for lower-income workers, shaping the welfare consequences of innovation policy." conference.nber.org/conf_pap…