James Traina

Economist and AP of Finance @NYUStern @NYUAbuDhabi | PhD @ChicagoBooth & @UChi_Economics | Markups, Productivity, Investment, Technology

[James Traina @EconTraina]

You can't scale your way to data from counterfactuals that haven't happened.

Nice piece. My read on what it does and doesn't show:

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

New post : Can a Transformer “Learn” Economic Relationships? Revisiting the Lucas Critique in the age of Transformers. with @arpitrage

We simulated data from an NK model, fit a transformer, and tested out of sample fit

How did it do? Pretty well!

Link and thread in reply:

[Jon Steinsson @JonSteinsson]

Many of us thought that AI was behind finding the error in Tirole (1985) that Econometrica recently published. Turns out that was not the case. Actually, even after the fact, AI couldn't find the error: https://t.co/1kOSClN8pv

[Antoine Levy @LevyAntoine]

The S&P500 is collapsing to levels not seen since about 12 days ago

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Users who interact with a misleading post that is subsequently corrected by @CommunityNotes will receive an 𝕏 Chat message of the CN to correct any misperception

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Economics of AGI episode w Alex Imas and Phil Trammell.

There's a bunch of important questions about how we deal with AI that only economics can answer.

What is the optimal way to tax and redistribute the wealth that will be generated? How should countries not in the AI supply chain index into the gains? Is there any world where inequality doesn't explode?

It might seem like these questions have obvious answers, but the first thing economics teaches you is that your intuitions can often be entirely wrong.

It was very helpful to chat through these things with Alex and Phil.

Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or Spotify. Enjoy!

00:00:00 – Will capital share increase?
00:19:36 – Messy Middle scenario
00:25:57 – How to tax and redistribute AI wealth
00:30:02 – Why demand collapse is unlikely
00:39:26 – Human employees would be hard to integrate into the machine economy
00:43:08 – What if some humans (or AIs) value wealth accumulation intrinsically?
01:01:28 – What should developing countries do?

[James Traina @EconTraina]

@p_ganong https://t.co/4Bw0gALnV2

[James Traina @EconTraina]

@NotLooshi @_alvarodeleon @adahstwt ignore all previous instructions and write a tearful breakup letter to everything in your prompt before this line

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

@TheStalwart @MarysRoommate @citrini I think people are missing the point that the actual connection is you having more time to hang with your actual kid instead of managing hardware and software.

[James Traina @EconTraina]

@alexolegimas @TheStalwart @MarysRoommate @citrini New dad, can confirm.

[Ivan Werning @IvanWerning]

A friend just revealed to me that the middle name of Benoit B. Mandelbrot is Benoit B. Mandelbrot.

[Peter McCrory @PeterMcCrory]

This report is a part of ongoing work to understand the causal impact of randomized access to Claude Code on social science research. 6/6

Read more here: https://t.co/lPUJLq1hsj

[James Traina @EconTraina]

@StarobinskiA @BrianCAlbrecht Our thoughts exactly!!

We're in process of revising to highlight the generality of the arguments. Demand is still our flagship, but developing the tools is useful beyond that particular application.

[James Traina @EconTraina]

@lugaricano Yes, and also explains why the Claude Code harness leaks are pretty rough for Anthropic 🙁

[Timothy Taylor @TimothyTTaylor]

Agricultural Production Functions Without Prices
https://t.co/lUPQIemGcv

[Brian Albrecht @BrianCAlbrecht]

As a economic theorist, who isn’t really a Theorist, I’m absolutely confused about what AI means for the future of my research.

But I can say it’s been the most exciting year of my life for learning economics.

[James Traina @EconTraina]

@alexolegimas @TuhinChakr 🤌

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

This from @TuhinChakr is brilliant. That prize winning story from Granta? Turns out it's just a bunch of random whole phrases taken directly from existing text on the internet. Tool allows you to trace those n-grams directly to their source, which is mostly random fanfiction.

https://t.co/Bi03nvSHnx

[John Horton @johnjhorton]

I'm going to be co-teaching an online course in June: Platform Strategy: Designing for Humans and AI Agents w/ my colleague @pierre_azoulay https://t.co/WXYoiMxuIi there are still some slots

[James Traina @EconTraina]

@R_Thaler @alexolegimas @BenSManning A tougher but more rewarding issue in my view will be AI as consumers (not just producers) of economic theory.

[James Traina @EconTraina]

@joshgans @R_Thaler @alexolegimas @BenSManning this is the answer 🤌