No you don't

Was about to be my comment

But fracking itself was a pretty revolutionary change in tech!

The original study linked just doesn't really affect my priors much about the net effect of the new technology on total welfare in the long run.

If your only point is that we should do a better job measuring "meaningfulness in life", I agree! But we should also include not only meaningfulness generated by work, but also everything else (leisure, time with family, ability to have family if you want etc).

People have studied robots making cars, we can observe without any fancy econometrics that way fewer people are now employed in car manufacturing, wages across the income distribution are higher, and there isn't mass unemployment.

It's not obvious that everyone has less meaningful jobs.

I'm not saying there are only short run concerns. I'm saying we can't take the partial equilibrium of moving from code writer to code checker as the long run equilibrium. I think this is exactly econ offers- thinking about utility maximization and eqm adjustment.

AI is coming whether we like it or not, so people like us will have ample opportunity to study labor market dynamics as it plays out. But I don't think it's a good prediction to say that everyone will either be unemployed or will simply be doing a less meaningful version of the identical job.

We're a free society where people can choose to do what they want given the state of the world. We don't centrally plan what jobs people switch to when things change (policies, technology, etc), hence I don't think it's fair to expect us to know exactly how people will optimize in a counterfactual.

I mean... there were a ton of people employed in vehicle manufacturing. Now there aren't. And we don't have mass unemployment. I imagine long run people who otherwise would have chosen the auto industry chose a variety of different things to do.

Yeah, agree. But what you're describing is a short run phenomenon right? There is long run adjustment, too. When robots started assembling cars, people started doing other things that presumably brought them more meaning than simply supervising the robots that were now assembling the cars.

Interesting. I'd much rather my industry reward clear thinking about research questions and research design than coding proficiency, for example. But I also definitely also derive more personal meaning from answering important questions than I do from coding.

I don't think Wisconsin and Illinois hunting areas are terribly different from each other topographically or in terms of population density. So could be a reasonable comparison.

But I also think we might be comparing zero with zero

Do we have research on the absolute frequency of hunting rifle bullets meant for deer striking people in states without such laws? I'm guessing the absolute number is tiny, but I could be mistaken.

Totally (and I think the law is similar in Illinois). Just the logic of banning rifles and allowing handguns in the name of public safety perplexes me.

My approach is to focus on question I want to answer first, and when I realize I don't have the tools to answer it, I ask Rachael to co-author with me. Sadly the answer is usually no.