,"Citrini’s argument is that AI enables the automation of some (eventually most) services, recreating Baumol’s cost disease within the service sector. Services that can be broken down into discreet tasks (“Taylorized”) and can make use of an increasingly data rich environment, such as call center work, basic accounting, legal discovery, graphic design, much sales work, or routine diagnostics and coding, will be automated, reducing the total labor force employed and increasing productivity. At the same time, there will remain a labor-intensive service subsector with low productivity growth. This labor-intensive subsector will itself be under immense pressure as AI and robotics advance.

This bifurcation recreates Baumol’s cost disease within the service sector, destroying many of the well-paid positions that have retained some degree of workplace autonomy in the process. The result of this transformation in work would be the emergence of an economy shaped by very few highly paid service workers, and an army of low-skill, low-paid workers. All of this would take place against the backdrop of a collapse in the total mass of service employment due to productivity gains.

The lesson from technological innovation in the manufacturing sector is that increased productivity means that firms require fewer workers. While new markets may develop along with new services, these new services will not escape the division between a small number of well-paid workers and a dwindling mass of their low-paid peers. The worst-case scenario would be one in which even this low-waged work disappears thanks to service automation."

https://jacobin.com/2026/04/ai-stagnation-services-productivity-unemployment

#AI #GenerativeAI #SecularStagnation #Automation #Productivity #Unemployment

As insane wealth concentration gets ever more extreme, wealth turnover in annual spending — the very stuff of economic activity — plummets.

Covid-era spending was just another step down.

The arithmetic of this is not complicated. #SecularStagnation

Politicians remain wedded to #growth as the solution to all problems. But that growth has gone. "To all intents and purposes, we're already living in a kind of #postgrowth economy. But we haven't figured out how to make that work."

@ProfTimJackson on #RadioNZ with Kim Hill → https://cusp.ac.uk/themes/aetw/tj-radionnz-jan23/

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cc #degrowth #wellbeingeconomy #beyondgdp #secularstagnation

Politicians’ growth fetish is the problem—and Sunak is headed for the same budget trap as Truss | New @TheGuardian Op-ed by @ProfTimJackson → https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/16/politicians-growth-fetish-sunak-budget-climate

"To all intents and purposes, we’re already living in a post-growth world. And it’s time to take that challenge seriously."

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#AutumnBudget #RishiSunak #JeremyHunt #UKtreasury #PostGrowth #Degrowth #SecularStagnation #Recession #WellbeingEconomy #GrowthDependency #BeyondGDP #EconTwitter

It’s Not in Your Head: The World Really Is Getting Worse

...Narratives that see widespread economic and technological stagnation setting in sometime around the mid-1970s have become fairly common. And it’s pretty clear that the 1970s were some sort of inflection point, a time when we fell off established income, innovation, and progress curves on a number of fronts. The big question is why....

https://thewalrus.ca/its-not-in-your-head-the-world-really-is-getting-worse/

#progress #SecularStagnation #technology #decline #AndrewPotter