Most of the debate about AI and labor markets is a debate about workers. Almost none of it is about the entity standing quietly behind every payroll. Moving from employment-share exposure to labor-tax-revenue exposure changes which occupations matter — and which policies do. Results draw on ongoing joint work with Dhushyanth Raju applying the Richmond (2026) AI transition framework to Türkiye's 2024 Household Labour Force Survey Most of the debate about AI and labor markets is a debate about workers: who gets displaced, who gets augmented, who gets retrained. Almost none of it is about the entity standing quietly behind every payroll: the treasury. Governments in most middle- and high-income countries raise roughly half of their revenue from labor — personal income tax plus social security contributions. If AI-driven capital deepening shifts factor income from labor toward capital, that base erodes at precisely the moment demand for social spending r...
A Skeptic’s Guide to Economic Impact Claims A Skeptic’s Guide to Economic Impact Claims Six questions anyone can ask about the economic promises attached to a big development — and what I learned building the model that produced them. When a large project comes to your county, it arrives with a number. Billions in economic impact. Thousands of jobs. Tens of millions in new revenue. That number is almost always paid for by the people who want the project approved, calculated using software whose workings are not public, and presented to a council as settled fact. Residents get to react to it. They almost never get to check it. Last year I built an economic model of Montgomery County, Maryland, from public data. It estimates what a given amount of spending actually does to the local economy. Building it taught me something more useful than any of its own numbers: the specific places where impact claims go wrong, and how to spot them without needing a mo...