Peter McCrory
speaker
628 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 19 Jun
Peter McCrory’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Labor productivity growth has been strong throughout the pandemic and has been sustained so far.
Yeah.
But to get on an inflection, you need to at least move a little bit.
I think maybe you're seeing some signs there.
On the labor market, though, the labor market is in a reasonably healthy spot.
And I think it might be because it's primarily at so far a labor augmenting skill bias technology, not yet the full sort of general purpose substitute for all of cognitive labor, although perhaps that's the trajectory that we're on.
Yeah, I tend to think about this in sort of three aspects of what composes a job.
One is you need to decide what to do and direct and delegate.
You need to then do the actual implementation of the work, and then you need to sort of evaluate or at least set up systems that can evaluate.
At least from my perspective as an economist, this bitter lesson is materializing in terms of very rapid advances in the implementation work of what an economist does.
Downloading data, running regressions, building models, solving them using sort of contemporary solution techniques, numerical methods.
I definitely felt that personally with Opus 4.5, where I was, for the first time, able to just delegate a very complex task.
I had this very specific research question trying to understand the cyclicality of hiring across different occupations and how that relates to occupational exposure.
That's a mouthful.
I gave that task to Claude, and Claude was able to just iterate on it.
And I could redirect Claude in the same way that you might redirect a grad student.
And the big question that I have in mind is, you know, at what point do the boundaries at the direction setting stage, the research taste, you might call it, and will the models become sufficiently reliable?
I expect that these models will soon have better intuitions about how to do good economic research and that there is this big question of like, at what point will we be able to fully automate social science research?
We've done some work on this to try to understand how coding agents are beginning to automate social science research.
But I don't think we're quite there yet.
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