Mark Blyth is old and has seen it all before

Almost as usual, this interview with Mark Blyth doesn’t exactly go where the interviewer thinks that it’s going to go. They discuss jobs, AI, and scams. They discuss Britain’s idiotic economic policy—but Blyth levels that accusation against most of Europe and the West (e.g., Germany and the U.S., the two countries with which he’s the most familiar).

The interviewer tries to steer things to tried and true liberal topics—I don’t know why; had he never seen Blyth speak before? Or didn’t he understand him enough to see that Blyth doesn’t put up with bullshit. He needs data. I last wrote about Blyth in another excellent interview (though it was likely considered disastrous by the interviewer) in Mark Blyth explains everything on December 23, 2024 (just a half a year ago).

Economist Mark Blyth TEARS INTO Labour's Economic Strategy by Novara Media (YouTube)

At about 28:00,

“Um so could AI in the near future sort of massively bring down prices in certain sectors and could that have an overall deflationary effect? It could do if the hype around it is true.

“Mark BlythBut the thing about … I’m old. The thing about being old is, you know, you’ve seen it before. I remember when this was called big data That was 15 years ago.

“There was a book produced in 2010 —by a couple of guys at Harvard Business School I think it was, or the Kennedy School—the race against the machine. It said 60% of all jobs are going to be automated by 2016/2020. Uh, then there was an Oxford business-school-side business-school study said “No lad, you got that wrong it’s only 40%.” Then the OECD went down to 20%. And we got to 2020 and none of it happened.

“So you know I’ve seen hype bubbles before. I’m still waiting for the blockchain revolution. I’ve noted many times that every time we’ve had a major technological shift, labor markets have transformed and gotten bigger not smaller. Because it all rests upon a “lump of labor” fallacy. There’s a certain amount of work to be done and if the robots do it, we don’t do it. So just color me skeptic on that entire thing.

“I think what’s happening—here’s an interesting one—if you want to ever think about this: Why is it the Trump administration’s going after the universities, right? Well, you know, antisemitism, etc. No. Why do they want to punish us? Because we’re the liberal elite. All right, here’s another one: How about all the tech barons are massively overinvested in AI and going to make huge losses because they can’t even define the short-term end use for it. And they’re never going to find 20% extra electricity to run these things So, it’s a bit of a bust. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get half a trillion a year in guaranteed funding that used to go to the top research universities to cover your losses? Just saying.”

At about 31:00,

“Fastest growing job in the United States by volume for the past 15 years is elder care nurse. It dwarfs software engineers and everything to do with that industry by a factor of 12 We’re all getting older. There’s no robot for lifting you in and out of bed and it’s not an AI problem to solve.

“[…]

“There’s nothing at risk in a lift button There’s a risk in your prostate diagnosis. And if the machine gets it wrong, who do you blame? [question of liability is huge] I’m simply saying that there are frictions in the real world that make the easy technology-adoption and instant transformation … particularly when you don’t have a good business case for most of the stuff that they’ve got, beyond cheating in academic essays.”