Ed Elson

Quote, the unemployment rate printed 10.2%.

And the cumulative drawdown in the S&P was down to 38% from October, 2026 highs.

And the central thesis is that AI adoption is going to cause this mass unemployment, which is going to reduce wages and reduce earnings across the board.

And it's gonna put the economy into this downward spiral.

And there's this idea that he brings up called, which he calls ghost GDP,

And I'll just read you the quote.

It says, when cracks began appearing in the consumer economy, economic pundits popularized the phrase ghost GDP, output that shows up in the national accounts, but never circulates through the real economy.

And this is really the central idea of this AI thesis, that there's going to be a lot of value that is created, but none of us are really ever going to see it.

And I think that that is...

arguably fair only up to a point.

And the trouble is, it gets into this level of doomerism that just is really unrealistic, where there's this idea that actually we're not going to be able to get paid anything.

Because AI is going to completely replace us, which is going to completely eviscerate incomes, completely eviscerate wages.

And meanwhile, as that is happening, consumption of the AI products is going to keep growing and growing and growing.

And this is the part that doesn't really make sense, because how is it?

that you're going to have people who don't have enough money to pay for anything or to consume anything, and yet consumption continues to go up.

And this is the part where he's very descriptive on the value destruction that we might see, but then completely ignores the value creation and what we might do with all of that productivity.

And I think this is the thing that a lot of people are taking issue with.

It's something that I take issue with as well.

I think that there's not enough analysis of what's going to happen on the other side of those accounts.

I mean, if you've got consumption going up, then that necessarily assumes that people have money to pay for things.