CONCEPT
The Korinek–Stiglitz Collaboration
The sustained research partnership between Anton Korinek (University of Virginia) and Joseph Stiglitz that has produced the most developed formal economic analysis of AI's distributional consequences — including the steering technological progress framework that gives Stiglitz's policy recommendations their analytical backbone.
The Korinek–Stiglitz collaboration began in the mid-2010s and has produced a sequence of papers modeling the macroeconomic consequences of AI with rigor uncommon in a discourse dominated by speculation and advocacy. Their central contributions: formal decomposition of labor-saving versus labor-augmenting AI and the distributional consequences of each; projection of unemployment rates exceeding fifteen percent under current institutional arrangements if the labor-saving mode dominates; analysis of why markets systematically select labor-saving applications even when labor-augmenting applications produce higher social welfare; and the steering framework demonstrating that when post-deployment redistribution is politically difficult, shaping which AI gets built becomes the effective policy lever.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The substitutability analysis is the analytical core. A productivity-enhancing technology can be deployed in two modes: labor-augmenting, in which each worker becomes more productive and retains her role at expanded capability; or labor-saving, in which the same output is produced with fewer workers. Claude