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Rethinking My Economics (2024 IMF essay)
Angus Deaton's 2024 <em>Finance & Development</em> essay acknowledging that mainstream economics had underestimated power — and warning that AI would intensify the distributional dynamics the discipline had consistently failed to predict.
Rethinking My Economics is the remarkable 2024 essay in which Angus Deaton, a Nobel laureate then nearly sixty years into his career, published in the IMF's Finance & Development what amounted to a public reckoning with mainstream economics. The essay opened with the directness of a scientist reporting a negative result: 'I have changed my mind.' What Deaton had changed his mind about was the capacity of the discipline he had practiced and advanced for half a century to predict and account for the distributional consequences of the policies it had championed. Globalization had produced aggregate gains while devastating specific communities. Market liberalization had increased efficiency while concentrating power. Technological change had raised productivity while hollowing out livelihoods.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The essay identified a specific analytical failure: mainstream economics had underestimated the role of power in shaping who benefits from economic change. The models assumed competition meaningful enough that workers could move to better jobs and consumers