Unemployment

While Adam Smith is celebrated in some circles as the “Father of Free-Market Economics” (Austrians would disagree), his writings on the “disadvantages” of the worker are misleading.

While Adam Smith is celebrated in some circles as the “Father of Free-Market Economics” (Austrians would disagree), his writings on the “disadvantages” of the worker are misleading.

One of the legacies of Keynesian thought is the belief that war is “good for the economy.” While war may help enable employment, nonetheless, its overall legacy is destructive, and even the jobs war “creates” are economically undesirable.

One of the legacies of Keynesian thought is the belief that war is “good for the economy.” While war may help enable employment, nonetheless, its overall legacy is destructive, and even the jobs war “creates” are economically undesirable.

Marx built part of his system on the belief that capital would create the “great reserve army of the unemployed,” and modern Marxists have made the same claim about AI. However, we are seeing AI actually enhance the value of labor, not diminish it.

For more than two centuries, the doomsday crowd has claimed that capital development will create mass unemployment. And for two centuries, they have been wrong. The same goes for artificial intelligence.

Like the Luddites of two centuries ago, pundits tell us to fear AI because it might put people out of work and create mass unemployment. But AI is not a threat to our jobs, unlike the regulation the government unleashes ostensibly to control AI.

Keynesians claimed that stagflation—rising price levels and increasing rates of unemployment—couldn’t happen. Then it happened time and again, something predicted and coherently explained by Austrian economists.

AI is not the killer—it is the coroner.

AI is not the killer—it is the coroner.