Asmus Leth Olsen

Professor of public administration, Dept. of Political Science, University of Copenhagen.
Foto: Freja Wille.

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

New working paper out: Can we diversify the pipeline to bureaucracy?

[Josephine Arnfred @j_arnfred]

My first working paper is now live!

Can minority role models help diversify the bureaucracy of the future?

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

Damn. Was rooting for Claude Parable. https://t.co/FIGfyXoeO5

[Stephanie Palazzolo @steph_palazzolo]

Scoop: A neutered version of Mythos called Claude Fable is coming today. It's expensive—2x the price of Opus—but perhaps not as pricey as people might have thought from the initial Mythos pricing (5x Opus).

More on that and Apple WWDC in AI Agenda:

https://t.co/2QLmlCQuYI

[2001 Live @25YearsAgoLive]

Child actor Natalie Portman celebrates her 20th birthday.

[Daisuke Sakai @monogragh]

現在は行政研究の黄金期にあるが、かなりの論文が経済学ジャーナルに掲載されている。それらと行政研究ジャーナルの論文とはどう違うか？──を記述的に比較するというもの。

Public Administration Beyond Public Administration Journals
https://t.co/sF6LxBfXjc

[2001 Live @25YearsAgoLive]

In UK General Elections, Tony Blair and his Labour Party win a second landslide victory.

[Martin Vinæs Larsen @mvinaes]

Apati i Busgaden ovenpå Wammen-degraderingen.

Nogle står i hjørnet og krammer. Flere er i tårer. Langt de fleste ryster på hovedet og prøver at komme videre med deres dag.

[Peter Gostev @petergostev]

BREAKING: Uber engineers now required to earn Claude Code credits by driving Anthropic employees.

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

@nikolajrytgaard Et helt syltekøkken?

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

@baltadydensborg Tja lidt grus i maskineret på en dårlig reform?

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

Hvad har De Radikale fået? Lov til at være med?

[Luke Metro @luke_metro]

From a young age, I have always wanted to be the exit liquidity for shareholders of artificial intelligence companies

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

Att. DR Nyheder: Min mor ved ikke, hvad “goat material” er

[Tom Nuttall @tom_nuttall]

That AfD-boosting austerity in full.

[2001 Live @25YearsAgoLive]

A crowded beach on Berlin’s Strandbad Wannsee.

Berliners who lack the means or motivation to go to the sea can find their very own lake in the west of the city, which gets crowded on hot spring days like this.

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

Så klar til en meningsløs udgave af det her

[roon @tszzl]

not enough people are emotionally prepared for if it’s not a bubble

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

Nu må venner og fjender forene sig:
Vi skal have stoppet det her mesterskab til AGF

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

@mvinaes Haha hvad så sideordnet opstilling

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

@AnderssonMikkel Mistral er #73 i verden: https://t.co/LJXkO6UuR2

[Alex Imas @alexolegimas]

New essay on the economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work.

1. Almost any question about the impact of advanced AI on the economy needs to start at the same place: what is still scarce? Answer that, and the analysis becomes pretty straightforward. This essay explores what becomes scarce if AI really can replicate most of what humans do in production, and what this mean for the future of jobs.

2. My conjecture, working through the economics: labor reallocates across sectors, and the sector it reallocates to has properties that keep labor a meaningful share of the economy. Ultimately this is about the structure of demand itself. For this, we have to go back to Girard, Augustine and Rousseau: once people's base needs are met, their preferences shift to comparative motives (e.g., status, exclusivity, social desirability). This motive is inherently non-satiated.

4. The key paper is Comin, Lashkari, and Mestieri (Econometrica 2021). As people get richer, they don't buy proportionally more of everything. They shift spending toward sectors with higher income elasticity. They estimate income effects account for 75%+ of observed structural change.

5. The ironic consequence: the sector that gets automated becomes a smaller share of the economy, not a larger one. Agriculture got massively more productive and its share of employment collapsed. Manufacturing too. The "stagnant" sectors absorb the spending and the jobs.

6. So the question is: which sectors have high income elasticity in a post-AGI world? I argue it's what I call the relational sector. Categories where the human isn't just an input into production, it is part of the value.

7. Why does the relational sector have high income elasticity? Because human desire has a mimetic, relational dimension. We don't just want things for their intrinsic properties. We want what others want, and we want it more when others can't have it. Girard, Rousseau, Augustine, and Hobbes all saw this.

8. In work with Kristóf Madarász, we showed this experimentally: WTP roughly doubles when a random subset of others is excluded from the good. And in new work with Graelin Mandel, AI involvement kills the premium. Human-made art gains 44% from exclusivity; AI-made art only 21%.

9. This all comes together for the core argument. The sector that absorbs spending as AI makes commodity production cheap is one where human provenance is part of the value, and demand for it grows faster than income. Exactly the profile that keeps labor meaningful.

10. To be clear about the claim: I'm NOT saying aggregate labor share must rise. It may fall. The claim is about sectoral composition, i.e., where expenditure and employment go once commodities get cheap, and the fact that the sector that will absorb reallocated labor maps to a substantial component of human preferences and desire.

11. If you're interested in the formal model, a linked companion technical note works out all the economics.

Read the essay here: https://t.co/NcjVgn2o8g

[Asmus Leth Olsen @AsmusOlsen]

Bojes boldøje skal i Guinness Rekordbog https://t.co/6YH1d3sb3V