Emeritus economics professor at Yale University and Nobel laureate Robert Shiller wrote a fascinating and somewhat contrarian Op-Ed in the New York Times.
Shiller focuses on what he calls narrative economics (a branch of behavioral economics) and how people are swayed by narratives (instead of rational economic decision making).
Shiller warns all the fear mongering about how AI will cause massive unemployment can become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
He points to the Great Depression, which was not caused by the 1929 stock market crash, but instead a drop in consumer spending due to lack of consumer confidence: “As the economist Christina D. Romer’s seminal study on the era points out, the stock market crash didn’t cause the Depression. It couldn’t, given that only about 2 percent of American households owned stocks at that time. The fatal blow was a massive subsequent collapse in consumer spending, a collapse she attributed to a sudden onset of widespread uncertainty among consumers about their future incomes.”