PERSON
Andrew McAfee
The MIT economist who measured the machine age rather than prophesied it—naming the great decoupling between productivity and shared prosperity, coining the second machine age as a framework for the digital transformation, and insisting across two decades of careful counting that technology is not destiny but a choice our institutions must make.
Andrew McAfee is best understood not as a futurist but as an accountant of the future, in the most honorable sense. Where others argued about whether the machines would save us or ruin us, McAfee and his longtime collaborator Erik Brynjolfsson went to the data and asked a narrower, more honest question: what is actually happening to output, to wages, to employment, to the physical stuff we pull from the earth? The answers they found were neither comforting nor catastrophic. They were specific, and in a conversation drowning in hype and dread, specificity is itself a moral act. His central finding is the
great decoupling—the divergence, beginning in the late twentieth century, between American productivity and the income of the typical worker, a phenomenon he traces to
platform economics, the collapse of replication costs, and the structural tendency of
intelligent automation to