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Martin Bergstrom's avatar

I'm not sure any of these studies adequately disentangles "AI exposure" from interest rate exposure.

I read through the article cited by Brynjolfsson et al. on calculating the heterogenous impact of monetary policy on the labor market, and I'm not convinced that it serves as a useful control in regressions on recent industry data. It's long and dull but the upshot is essentially that more automated work/tasks are more subject to interest rate shocks on data, an effect calculated from 1978 to 2019.

However, interest rates sat at or near 0 from 2009 to 2015 and again from 2020 to 2022. These are the only times since 1955 that interest rates have a) sat near 0 and b) sat at the same place for a sustained period of time; yet that period is only a small sliver of the dataset they use for their calculations.

That's a problem, because negative real returns on savings can push more money into speculative investments like tech/start-ups. Global venture funding peaked in 2021 before dropping by 29% from 2021 to 2022 and 34% from 2022 to 2023 according to Deal Room. That drop was caused by the federal reserve announcing the highest rate increases in over a decade, not AI. That drop in venture funding is disproportionately impacting information technology focused companies, yet the "interest rate exposure" control Brynjolfsson et al. is using a calculation that ranks information technology heavy professions as relatively low in interest rate exposure. The actual interest rate exposure of these information focused professions is actually going to be highly correlated with AI automation exposure right now.

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