AI and Our Economic Future
Charles I. Jones · The Journal of Economic Perspectives · 1 Aug 2026
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Where this sits in the debate
- Will AI actually boost productivity and growth? · its finding: it depends (why studies differ)
- Will AI destroy more jobs than it creates?
- How fast will the impact arrive? · its finding goes against the claim (why studies differ)
Direction of the finding as read from the abstract by an AI model (AI-written).
Abstract
Artificial intelligence (AI) will likely be the most transformative technology of the modern era. What if machines—AI for cognitive tasks and AI plus advanced robots for physical tasks—can perform every task a human can? This essay makes three main points. First, even though US growth rates have been stable at roughly 2 percent per year for 150 years, it is distinctly possible that automating intelligence leads economic growth rates to accelerate. Second, this acceleration is likely to be slowed by the presence of “weak links.” While we each have access to 100 million times more transistors on our desktop computer than people in the 1970s, we are not 100 million times more productive. Computers can invert matrices at lightning speed, but we humans must still decide what matrix to invert, what hypothesis to test, and so on. Accelerating economic growth requires the vast majority of the weak links to be automated away, which delays the large gains. Finally, even though weak links slow the benefits, they may actually speed up the risks. When a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, damaging one link in the chain can be very costly. A powerful AI that is superhuman at software engineering could be misused by a bad actor to do substantial harm by hacking the financial system or a virology lab.
About this publication
Leading field journal. A leading journal in economics or a neighbouring field (on the Tinbergen Institute’s A list or near the top of the RePEc ranking), or a top-rated computer-science venue.
Placed by: Tinbergen Institute A list. How sources are ranked.
- Published
- 2026 (3 months ago)
- Citations
- 2 (OpenAlex)
Citations in context
2 citations — 96th percentile among the 188 indexed papers from 2026 in this collection. Citation counts favor older papers; this compares only same-year papers here, not the whole literature.
author affiliation matches seed institutions stanford, stanford university — part of why this paper is in the collection.
Related by theme, not necessarily by method or conclusion.
- A Research Agenda for the Economics of Transformative AI
Communications of the ACM · 2026 - Economic Growth Under Transformative AI
Annual Review of Economics · 2023 - Economic impacts of AI-augmented R&D
Research Policy · 2024 - A Framework for Economic Growth with Capital-Embodied Technical Change
American Economic Review · 2024
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