For the past few months I’ve been working on a theory. It started out as just a fun little data exercise looking at some different types of taxes and benefits and how it effects what people buy and how much they work. During that time I took advantage of opus and later fable to help me get data, but as I was doing that of course opus might interject with some assumption I had wrong or some paper that shows the opposite. This back and forth continued for some time, and, well, it’s culminated in two pieces, one written by me and one written by fable. Both of us think it’s quite significant, so, feel free to give either of them a read.

My version, in my voice. Visual, anecdotal, not much in the way of maths or technical details.

Fable’s version. The same theory, but formal. Very similar to the framework developed by nobel prizewinning economist Daron Acemoglu alongside Pascual Restrepo.

It uses the same task based model, but the difference is that I have merged the concepts of reinstatement and augmentation. In their work, they say augmentation is when technology makes a human more capable, whereas reinstatement is technology that makes an entirely new job description (Their third case is displacement, where automation replaces someone). I merge reinstatement into augmentation, based on this premise: They only appear different because the former creates a new job seemingly out of nowhere. In some pure sense though, that job always existed, it was just economically underwater, not augmented enough to employ anyone. Augmentation improves until suddenly the job description comes into being. I could babble about programming languages and carve algorithms into tablets a thousand years ago, it’s just nobody would pay me for it. Soon nobody will pay me for it once again.

Another possible argument for why their model doesn't work: For reinstatement to not run out, you assume an infinite pool of new, human only reinstatable tasks. Might seem plausible at first, but the low MPC (marginal propensity to consume) of the wealthy sortof implies the opposite; our needs do actually get satisfied after a while, and we can't endlessly come up with reinstatement tasks.

Then that causes a difference in the conclusions: their model has the implication "technological progress maybe bad" whereas mine is "technological progress has a tendency to get bad, the industrial revolution was special".

Extremely not validated but here's my continued thoughts, implied by the model Things that "A New-ish Theory of Economics" predicts - Wilsons Blog

These two theories really are the same, just written two different ways. Give them a read, tell me what you think.