Economist Ben Moll: You Can Model Anthropic's 15% AI GDP Growth, But It Won't Happen
sebkrier · x · 2026-09-11
Economist Ben Moll responds to Anthropic's new economics team model on how AI could affect growth, jobs, and wages by 2030.
- How to model 15% AI-driven GDP growth: trivially easy — take a standard Solow model, insert a task-based production function, and calibrate in a seemingly innocuous way; any well-trained econ undergrad could do it. Anthropic's model is fancier, but the core logic is the same: AI removes labor as a bottleneck on growth.
- Is 15% a reasonable prediction? No. The conclusion rests on assumptions unlikely to hold in practice. As Moll puts it: just because you can write down such a model doesn't mean you should, and theoretical possibility doesn't guarantee real-world outcomes. Details are in the supplement to his essay with Alex Olegimas.
Related event: Economists Push Back on Predictions of Double-Digit AI-Driven GDP Growth(10 posts)→
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