The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: Productivity, Labor, and Policy

This book offers a rigorous but accessible economic map of the AI economy.Moving beyond both technological hype and alarmist predictions of mass unemployment, Ceyhun Elgin explains how AI changes the allocation of tasks between humans and machines, why productivity gains may be delayed or uneven, and how wages, inequality, market power, public finance, financial stability, and global development are likely to be transformed.AI, the book argues, is not simply a new tool that makes existing work faster.It is a general-purpose, task-reallocating technology that changes the organization of production itself. Bringing together macroeconomics, labor economics, industrial organization, finance, public finance, development economics, and political economy, the book provides a unified framework for understanding the most important economic transformation of our time.It examines why AI may generate a productivity boom in some sectors while producing displacement and concentration in others; why