In the News

Over the past few years, concerns about fake news have taken center stage in news outlets across the country. But as technology allows audiences to further segment and ideological echo chambers have become the norm, less attention has been devoted to the increasingly prolific genre of merely misleading news.

Income inequality dominates our political and policy debates. Perhaps the latest example of this phenomenon is the extent to which proposals regarding how much the rich should be taxed have become ubiquitous in our discourse.

Given recent progress in the development of artificial intelligence, many policy conversations take for granted that such advancements will lead to mass technological unemployment and could even create a permanent underclass. Once these “facts” are established, a radical and sweeping policy solution typically follows, most often an argument for the necessity of a Universal Basic Income (UBI). But despite their growing popularity, such apocalyptic predictions about the role of AI in replacing human labor and the need for a UBI are greatly overblown. Although I’ve written on this topic previously (one article even garnering a response from Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang), the doomsayers’ case seems to be in need of a robust response.

Social media has pushed us to try to summarize everything we think and feel in less than 140 characters. In Stubborn Attachments Tyler Cowen accomplished a figurative tweet, answering some of the most complex questions of philosophy, politics, and economics in less than 140 pages.

Whether policymakers should even consider ideas for a UBI, given recent studies that suggest an expanded labor market from future AI and relatively strong current economic conditions, is still an open question.