Justified Posteriors

This week, we’re joined by David Deming , top labor economist, blogger at the Forked Lightning Substack, and — since 2025 — Undergraduate Dean of Harvard College, to ask how the value of social skills will change in the age of thinking and talking machines. We start with his QJE paper “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market,” which models social skills as a factor that reduces...

We’re honored to host Daron Acemoglu , Institute Professor at MIT and 2024 Nobel laureate. Daron has spent a decade arguing that AI should be built to make human expertise more valuable rather than to replace it, most recently in “Building Pro-Worker AI” with David Autor and Simon Johnson, and in a Nature essay on why we should stop talking about AGI . He also has a new book out, What Happened to...

This week, we’re joined by Martin Beraja of UC Berkeley Haas, one of the most prolific macroeconomists working on AI. We start with his newest paper “Growth at the Resource Frontier” — with Noam Yuchtman — which argues that NYT v. OpenAI is just the latest instance of a very old pattern — innovators appropriate resources nobody had bothered to assign property rights to (oil, the electromagnetic sp...

In this episode, we discuss “When GDP Misleads: Inferring Living Standards from the Value of a Statistical Life” , written by Stanford/Anthropic economist Chad Jones and Stanford/Epoch economist Philip Trammell. The word “AI” never appears in it, yet every argument about whether AI will show up in the statistics runs through the question of whether the statistics were ever measuring the right thin...

Justified Posteriors reads “Writing Code vs. Shipping Code” by Mert Demirer, Leon Musolff, and Liyuan Yang In this week’s episode of Justified Posteriors, we update our beliefs with evidence from an ambitious new paper estimating the impact of AI on software production productivity. Demirer (friend of the show), Musolff, and Yang combine public GitHub records for over 100,000 developers with confi...

This week we’re joined by Martha Gimbel , executive director and co-founder of The Budget Lab at Yale . Martha has worked just about everywhere economic policy gets made — the Joint Economic Committee, the Obama and Biden Councils of Economic Advisers, and Indeed’s Hiring Lab — and she’s now one of the clearest voices on what the data does (and doesn’t yet) say about AI and the labor market. We st...

In this episode of Justified Posteriors , we host Alan Rozenshtein and Kevin Frazier — the law-professor duo behind Lawfare’s Scaling Laws — to take two of the most-discussed AI policy documents of the spring and subject them to an inquisition. Our disputors are probably not what Pope Leo anticipated: two lawyers, two economists, and probably 3/4ths Jewish. Talk about a crossover episode! First up...

This week we’re joined by Ioana Marinescu , labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice , former Principal Economist at the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division , and a member of Anthropic’s Economic Advisory Board . Ioana is one of the people who put labor-market monopsony on the antitrust map, and she’s now thinking hard about what the social s...

This week we to with Kevin Bryan , Associate Professor of Strategy at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School , author of the legendary economics blog A Fine Theorem , co-founder of the ed-tech startup All Day TA , and the man behind one of the most-discussed Twitter/X feeds in econ, @Afinetheorem . Kevin recently published a multi-book review of the economics of AI in the Journal of Economic Li...

Seb Krier on AGI, Scaffolding, and Coasean Bargaining at Scale In this episode of Justified Posteriors , we welcome Seb Krier — policy lead for AGI at Google DeepMind and excellent Twitter poster. Speaking in his personal capacity, Seb walks us through his understanding of AGI, why AI alignment has gone better than expected, the potential and limitations of a world where agents constantly barter o...

This week, we’re joined by Avi Goldfarb , one of the leading economists of artificial intelligence and co-author of Prediction Machines . Avi has been thinking seriously about AI economics long before the ChatGPT shock, so we asked him what he thinks the earlier framework got right, what it missed, and how economists should update their beliefs now. The conversation starts with Avi’s seminal book,...

Get full access to Justified Posteriors at empiricrafting.substack.com/subscribe This week, instead of reviewing a recent paper on AI, we go back to a 1993 classic: Michael Kremer’s “The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development.” It’s one of those papers that feels larger than its formal model. The setup is extremely simple: production consists of many tasks, and output depends on all of them going r...

This week, instead of reviewing an economics paper, we reviewed a work of philosophy—perhaps the most important one of this young millennium so far. Anthropic published its new constitution for Claude in January 2026, and we read the whole thing so you don’t have to. Sometimes it reads like the US Constitution, laying out the basic law, sometimes like the Federalist Papers discussing itself. In pa...

University of Chicago behavioral economist Alex Imas joins us for a conversation on AI, economic growth, behavioral economics, and the future of science. We discuss whether AI could ever lead to negative growth, why simple “automation means abundance” stories may miss important welfare effects, and how behavioral economics changes the way we think about satiation, meaning, and human preferences in...

In this episode, Seth and Andrey break down AI and the Quantity and Quality of Creative Products: Have LLMs Boosted Creation of Valuable Books? by Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel, presented at the NBER Digital Economics and AI conference. Imke and Joel are a great team of digitization researchers, with particular expertise in Amazon book sales data. The paper uses Amazon data to ask whether AI has...

We sit down with prominent blogger and economist Noah Smith to dig into the disconnect between AI hype and current macroeconomic reality. The central puzzle: if a “god machine” driving 20% annual GDP growth is truly imminent, why aren’t real interest rates skyrocketing as people borrow against a much wealthier future? Noah’s take is that markets are pricing in significant growth, but not civilizat...

In this week’s episode of Justified Posteriors, we interview TAI expert and friend of the show Basil Halperin of the University of Virginia. There Basil is doing some of the most fascinating work on the economics of TAI with Anton Korinek and other leading researchers. The first section of our conversation covers Basil’s early career, including jobs at Uber and AQI, how he got interested in AI as...

We discuss “ Voice in AI Firms: A Natural Field Experiment on Automated Job Interviews ” by Brian Jabarian and Luca Henkel. The paper examines a randomized experiment with call center job applicants in the Philippines who were assigned to either AI-conducted voice interviews, human interviews, or given a choice between the two. Key Findings: * AI interviews led to higher job offer rates and propor...

Anecdotes of AI Supercharged Science: Justified Posteriors reads “Early Science Acceleration Experiments with GPT-5” In this episode, Seth and Andrey break down OpenAI’s report, Early Science Acceleration Experiments with GPT-5 . The paper is organized as a series of anecdotes about how top scientists used an early version of GPT-5 in their scientific investigations. The coauthors of the papers tr...

In this episode, we sit down with Ben Golub , economist at Northwestern University, to talk about what happens when AI meets academic research, social learning, and network theory. We start with Ben’s startup Refine , an AI-powered technical referee for academic papers. From there, the conversation ranges widely: how scholars should think about tooling, why “slop” is now cheap, how eigenvalues exp...

Seth and Andrey are back to evaluating an AI evaluation, this time discussing METR’s paper “Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks.” The paper’s central claim is that the “effective horizon” of AI agents—the length of tasks they can complete autonomously—is doubling every 7 months. Extrapolate that, and AI handles month-long projects by decade’s end. They discuss the data and the assumptions...

We continue our conversation with Columbia professor Bo Cowgill. We start with a detour through Roman Jakobson’s six functions of language (plus two bonus functions Seth insists on adding: performative and incantatory). Can LLMs handle the referential? The expressive? The poetic? What about magic ? The conversation gets properly technical as we dig into Crawford-Sobel cheap talk models, the collap...

In this episode, we brought on our friend Bo Cowgill , to dissect his forthcoming Management Science paper, Does AI Cheapen Talk? The core question is one economists have been circling since Spence drew a line on the blackboard: What happens when a technology makes costly signals cheap? If GenAI allows anyone to produce polished pitches, résumés, and cover letters, what happens to screening, hirin...

In this episode of Justified Posteriors podcast, Seth and Andrey discuss “GDPVal” a new set of AI evaluations, really a novel approach to AI evaluation, from OpenAI. The metric is debuted in a new OpenAI paper, “ GDP Val: Evaluating AI Model Performance on Real-World, Economically Valuable Tasks. ” We discuss this “bottom-up” approach to the possible economic impact of AI (which evaluates hundreds...

In this episode, Seth Benzell and Andrey Fradkin read “We Won’t Be Missed: Work and Growth in the AGI World” by Pascual Restrepo (Yale) to understand what how AGI will change work in the long run. A common metaphor for the post AGI economy is to compare AGIs to humans and men to ants. Will the AGI want to keep the humans around? Some argue that they would — there’s the possibility of useful exchan...