Berkeley PhD reading group asks: when labor becomes capital, who owns expertise?
TaniaBabina · x · 2026-10-17
Martin Beraja shared takeaways from a UC Berkeley PhD reading group on growth, technology, and innovation, centered on data ownership in the AI era.
- Human capital in Becker's sense is inalienable, but a model trained on your expertise is nonrival and copyable;
- What a model learns from any one lawyer or economist is really the jointly produced knowledge of the whole profession — each expert individually sells something the profession created together;
- This creates a huge collective-action problem over ownership and returns.
The discussion drew on "Nonrivalry and the Economics of Data" by Chad Jones and Chris Tonetti, and "Labor as Capital: AI and the Ownership of Expertise" by Zoe Cullen, Danielle Li, and Shengwu Li.
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