{"id":4163,"date":"2026-07-25T05:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T05:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=4163"},"modified":"2026-07-25T05:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T05:40:08","slug":"anthropics-head-of-economics-just-explained-why-we-havent-seen-a-white-collar-bloodbath-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=4163","title":{"rendered":"Anthropic\u2019s head of economics just explained why we haven\u2019t seen a white-collar bloodbath \u2014 yet"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The prediction that started it<\/h2>\n

Amodei has staked out some of the industry\u2019s most alarming public positions on AI\u2019s labor impact, though his framing has shifted considerably over the past year.<\/p>\n

Read more AI executives demand OpenAI release more details about how the Hugging Face hack happened<\/a><\/p>\n

In May 2025, he told Axios<\/em> AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10%-20% within one to five years, urging companies and policymakers to stop \u201csugarcoating\u201d the risk. He doubled down in a January 2026 essay, \u201cThe Adolescence of Technology,\u201d warning AI functions as a \u201cgeneral labor substitute for humans\u201d that will displace work from the lower tiers of skill levels to the upper, potentially creating a lasting underclass of unemployed or very-low-wage workers.<\/p>\n

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By this May, he had moderated somewhat, reframing automation as a multiplier of output and invoking the Jevons paradox recently repopularized by Apollo Global Management\u2019s Torsten Slok: \u201cIf you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job,\u201d he said, explaining \u201cthe 10% kind of expands to be 100% of what people do and kind of 10-times their productivity.\u201d The following month he reescalated, arguing in June significant, enduring job loss might be \u201can intrinsic property of the technology\u201d itself, and calling for government responses including wage insurance and universal basic income.<\/p>\n

What the company\u2019s own data shows<\/h2>\n

McCrory\u2019s analysis, framed as a synthesis of 18 months of Anthropic\u2019s internal economic research, tells a markedly different story. We \u201cdon\u2019t see significant impact of AI on the U.S. labor market,\u201d he wrote, at least not yet. The unemployment rate stood at 4.2% in June\u2014a level the Federal Reserve associates with full employment\u2014while job openings roughly matched the number of unemployed workers and prime-age employment sat near multi-decade highs.<\/p>\n

Most pointedly, McCrory says updated analysis using more recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows no relative deterioration in unemployment among workers whose jobs contain a large share of tasks that Claude is used to automate, compared with workers in less-exposed roles. <\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t expect unemployment to be noticeably higher a year from now\u2014at least not because of AI,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n

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McCrory\u2019s explanation for the gap centers on what he calls AI\u2019s \u201cstubbornly jagged\u201d capability profile, borrowing the term made famous by Wharton\u2019s Ethan Mollick: No job in the Labor Department\u2019s O*NET taxonomy has all of its tasks handled by Claude, and complex work still depends on human oversight to direct systems and catch their errors. He pointed to evidence Claude usage correlates with users acting as \u201cthought partners\u201d rather than replacements, and people with more domain expertise succeed more often and recover better when the AI stumbles\u2014the opposite of a scenario in which AI simply substitutes for human labor.<\/p>\n

McCrory\u2019s data most directly undercuts Amodei\u2019s \u201cgeneral labor substitute\u201d theory. His finding that unemployment among highly AI-exposed workers shows no relative deterioration compared to less-exposed workers is hard to square with a scenario in which AI is already acting as a wholesale replacement for human labor. If entry-level consultants, lawyers, and financial analysts were being systematically substituted out at the pace Amodei described to 60 Minutes<\/em> in November 2025, McCrory\u2019s occupation-level unemployment data should already show some divergence. By his account, it doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Read more LeBron James, the only billionaire currently active in the NBA, signs a minimum contract with the Philadelphia 76ers<\/a><\/p>\n

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The Jevons-based multiplier theory is actually closer to McCrory\u2019s own \u201cskill-biased, labor-augmenting\u201d framework. Both describe AI expanding what a smaller number of workers can accomplish rather than deleting jobs wholesale. But there is an unresolved tension here: The Jevons paradox requires time for markets and workers to adjust, yet Amodei has repeatedly said AI is moving faster than any past general-purpose technology, which is precisely the condition under which the Jevons rebalancing breaks down. McCrory\u2019s essay implicitly acknowledges the same soft spot. He notes hiring has already softened for young workers in AI-exposed roles, exactly the population that a slow, aggregate-level \u201cbigger pie\u201d effect wouldn\u2019t necessarily protect.<\/p>\n

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McCrory notes hiring for young workers in highly AI-exposed roles has softened over the past year, consistent with Stanford research on \u201ccanaries in the coal mine,\u201d and flags the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects slower growth through 2034 for occupations like technical writers, data entry workers, and customer support reps.<\/p>\n

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So the fairer story isn\u2019t that McCrory proved Amodei \u201cwrong\u201d outright: It\u2019s that the data undermines the specific magnitude and timeline of Amodei\u2019s original crisis scenario, while leaving open (and even lending some support to) his more recent, more moderate multiplier framing. Both men agree early-career, entry-level workers in highly exposed roles are the most vulnerable group right now. They just disagree about whether that\u2019s evidence of a coming catastrophe or a normal adjustment period within a still-healthy labor market.<\/p>\n

McCrory also conceded the future is uncertain: If AI begins automating innovation itself through recursive self-improvement, standard economic models allow for a scenario resembling the \u201csingularity\u201d that Amodei fears\u2014just not, in McCrory\u2019s read, on the near-term timeline or scale that his boss has publicly forecast.<\/p>\n

That leaves Anthropic publicly straddling two positions: an in-house data scientist insisting the disruption hasn\u2019t shown up yet, and a chief executive who has said many times now the disruption is coming fast and could be severe enough to warrant a policy response on the scale of universal basic income.<\/p>\n

For this story,\u00a0<\/em>Fortune\u00a0journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.<\/em><\/p>\n

Read more Jensen Huang just used his first ever X post to warn the AI industry not to make the mistake that software narrowly avoided in the 1980s<\/a><\/p>\n

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We’ve been hearing about doomsday, but Peter McCrory writes we “don\u2019t see significant impact of AI on the U.S. labor market.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[312],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economics"],"yoast_head":"\nAnthropic\u2019s head of economics just explained why we haven\u2019t seen a white-collar bloodbath \u2014 yet - Cross Country Moving Team<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/crosscountrymovingteams.com\/?p=4163\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Anthropic\u2019s head of economics just explained why we haven\u2019t seen a white-collar bloodbath \u2014 yet - 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