CONCEPT
An Economics of Worthy Amplification
The institutional design question at the heart of the Stiglitz–Segal synthesis: what would an economy look like if it were structured to reward genuine craft, real thinking, and honest care being fed into the amplifier, rather than structured to reward cheap plausible output at any depth? An answer specified through five institutional requirements, each identifiable, each politically contested.
An economics of worthy amplification translates Segal's moral question — Are you worth amplifying? — into an institutional question: does the economic environment reward worthy amplification and penalize its opposite? The current institutional environment does not. It rewards the production of smooth, plausible, scalable output over the production of genuine, deep, difficult output, because it cannot distinguish between them. The lemons dynamic eats the market for quality. An economy designed for worthy amplification would restore quality signals, internalize the externalities the AI economy produces, and break the concentration cycle that prevents the construction of the institutions required. Stiglitz's framework specifies the components with analytical precision and acknowledges the political obstacles with characteristic honesty.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The first institutional requirement is the restoration of quality signals. Before