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 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

There's the O-Net database that has very, very detailed records.

I'm like, here's a job and here's like a whole vector of things that are involved in that job.

So I'd say on that part, like just listing the tasks,

Pretty good.

The thing that I think we're less good on is how those tasks relate to one another.

This is the term called complementarity.

So this is the weak links model is essentially saying like, look, if tasks are completely separable, let's say I pull a lever at my factory and I talk to people on the factory floor and these are completely independent.

If I fail to pull the lever correctly, the other part of my job is unaffected.

There's other parts of the job, like cooking, for example.

Let's say I'm really good at 90% of the job, but I really screw up the seasoning.

That meal tastes like garbage.

You haven't succeeded.

So when the tasks are interrelated, screwing up on one or two tasks means you did not complete your job.

And it basically is kind of almost a zero-one sort of relationship.

So the extent of that complementarity at how these tasks are related will determine the extent to which

automation is going to affect the labor market.

And we don't have good numbers on that.

Exactly.

So that's something we need data on.

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