John Coogan

We're adding a lot of jobs.

AI will mean fewer workers are needed in jobs that exist today, but it will also create far more opportunities and increase productivity, he said.

Very white-pilling statement.

We'll see how it plays out.

Bezos argued that if AI makes it cheaper, faster, and easier to invent things, employment will ultimately rise because even though you're shrinking the number of people needed by 10x, the technology will create more than 10x as many opportunities.

And he certainly saw that with Amazon.

The number of store workers in physical retail stores probably shrunk, but the number of

entrepreneurs building products, selling them on Amazon, in and around the Amazon ecosystem, not just in the warehouse, but in the broader Amazon ecosystem, probably increase.

We certainly saw that in the broad job numbers in the United States.

The labor market has grown unequivocally since 1999.

We've added jobs all over the place as people have shifted around.

There's going to be two earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool because there's going to be so much productivity, he said.

That's an interesting take.

He's saying that there's going to be so much more productivity that some...

Some people will choose not to work and of course that won't necessarily show up in the unemployment rate because the unemployment rate only measures people that are actively looking for jobs.

So you could have a world where the workforce is shrinking in terms of the number of people that have typical jobs is declining.

but the unemployment rate is also very low because you have more single earner households, one person working, making more than enough money to support the whole family.

Sort of an older school mindset, harkens back to the maybe apocryphal stories about the mid 20th century, but certainly an optimistic view nonetheless.

Yeah, it's notable.

NEET levels have been rising since 2021.