Alex Imas

speaker

734 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 4 Jun

Alex Imas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.

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Odd Lots · Alex Imas on Why Economists Might Be Getting AI Wrong · 18 Apr 2026 podcast

First, 50% is not 100%.

That's obvious, right?

So you still need a human in the loop if AI can do 50%.

But two, it's the fact that a human job is a bunch of different tasks, right?

So this is not a new point.

David Atour has worked from the early 2000s with co-authors on this, saying this is the task-based model of jobs.

Derona Samoglu has the canonical model on this.

And the idea is that when we look at a job and we say, look, your job is exposed, let's say it's 50% exposed.

It really, really matters what tasks in your job are exposed and how these tasks relate to one another.

So let's say I have a job and I have a whole bunch of like completely meaningless garbage that I'm doing, but I have a comparative advantage and why I'm really getting paid for is like 20, 30% of the job.

If AI is automating the kind of like meaningless kind of rote things at my job, I could take all of that time

and I can focus on the parts of the job that are by comparative advantage.

What does that mean?

It means I'm going to become more productive, but I'm going to get paid more, even though my job is really exposed.

Now, what does that mean for the labor market?

Yeah, exactly.

Because of the increased productivity, right?

This is the O-ring model of jobs.

Avi Goldfarb and Joshua Gantz have this really nice paper on it.

I would say on that dimension, we're pretty good.

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