Episode description

Zachary Mazlish is an economist at the University of Oxford, and he joins David on Macro Musings to explain some recent and important macroeconomic developments, specifically the inflation linkages to the 2024 presidential election and the macroeconomic implications of transformative AI. David and Zach also discuss transformative AI’s impact on asset pricing, optimal monetary policy in world of high growth, the causes of the slowdown in trend productivity, and more.

Transcript for this week’s  episode.

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Related Links:

*Yes, Inflation Made the Median Voter Poorer* by Zachary Mazlish

*Transformative AI, Existential Risk, and Real Interest Rates* by Trevor Chow, Basil Halperin, and Zachary Mazlish

*Decomposing the Great Stagnation: Baumol’s Cost Disease vs. “Ideas Are Getting Hard to Find”* by Basil Halperin and Zachary Mazlish

*The Unexpected Compression: Competition at Work in the Low Wage Labor Market* by David Autor, Arin Dube, and Annie McGrew

Timestamps:

(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:04:03) – Inflation Made the Median Voter Poorer: Comparing Periods of Wage Growth

(00:15:26) – Inflation Made the Median Voter Poorer: The Median Change in the Wage

(00:22:19) – Assessing the Feedback to Zachary’s Article

(00:25:05) – The Significance of Transformative AI and its Double-Edged Sword

(00:27:02) – The Impact of Transformative AI on Asset Pricing and its Policy Challenges

(00:38:07) – The Broader Macroeconomic Effects of Rapid Growth

(00:41:05) – Optimal Monetary Policy in a World of High Growth

(00:43:19) – Exploring the Causes of the Productivity Slowdown

(00:49:21) – Outro