The White-Collar Canaries in the AI-Job-Loss Coal Mine Are Wide Awake, Feeding, & Chirping to Themselves: CHART OF THE DAY

Or: the dog is not barking in the nighttime, for there is no(t yet any) AI jobs shock, only executives spooked by the possibility of a future one. From the missing jobs shock to the destruction wrought by Trump-Musk DOGE to the management utopian philosophy of Peter Drucker: I see this morning that Torsten Slok reads it how I read it: We are not experiencing an “AI Jobs Shock”. At most, we are experiencing a reduction in hiring by executives who do not understand the technology but who have absorbed vibes that there will be a real-soon-now “AI Jobs Shock”. Where do these vibes come from? From a combination of grifters seeking money, and madmen hearing the voices in their heads of a forthcoming Digital God: Torsten Slok: Where Is the AI Jobs Shock? Not in India or the Philippines : ‘If AI were displacing white-collar work at scale, you would expect to see it first in the Philippines and India, where business process outsourcing (call centers, IT support, back-office processing) accounts for a large share of employment. Instead, the unemployment rate in both countries has continued to trend lower, with the Philippines near 5% and India near 6%, both well below their 2021 levels. The bottom line is that the hard data still show no signs that AI is generating job losses in the economies and industries most exposed to it: Now do not get me wrong. That the real effects are small in the context of the global economy does not mean that they are not there. But they are not yet large. And, for the most part, they appear to be consequences brought forward in time from a belief in a future in which there will be technology- and efficiency-driven substitution for labor. The Digital God-maddened and the grifters are having real effects, but they are almost all destructive with respect to institutions and firms that have been effected. The gullible have bought into and the malevolent have either bought into or pretend to have bought into these narratives. They have taken actions that have shredded institutions and capabilities that they are supposed to be managing and nurturing. Look at this, for example: Henry Farrell (2025): Silicon Valley’s Reading List Reveals Its Political Ambitions : ‘DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the latest manifestation of a longstanding Silicon Valley dream: to remake politics in its image…. DOGE’s grand effort to cut government down to size is the newest iteration of an epic narrative of change. Musk, a heroic entrepreneur, will surely make history as his tiny team of engineers cuts the government Leviathan down to size. One DOGE recruiter framed the challenge as “a historic opportunity to build an efficient government, and to cut the federal budget by 1/3.” When a small team remakes government wholesale, the outcome will surely be simpler, cheaper and more effective. That, after all, fits with the story that Silicon Valley disruptors tell themselves…. Like the Renaissance engineers who wanted to raze squalid and inefficient cities to start anew, DOGE proposes to flense away the complexities of government in a leap of faith that AI will do it all better. If the engineers were not thoroughly ignorant of the structures they are demolishing, they might hesitate and lose momentum…. [But] DOGE’s artificial-intelligence-fueled vision of government is a vision from Franz Kafka, not Friedrich Hayek… And also: Henry Farrell: How AI Madness Helped Fuel DOGE : ‘First, “effective accelerationism” is an important part of the intellectual mix that helped produce the AI-DOGE chimera. In particular, the neo-reactionary arguments of Nick Land have had real, and pernicious consequences…. Claims about how our world will be radically remade in the image of machine logic are nearly ubiquitous, whether the authors view the machine-god state as something to be feared, celebrated or both at once…. Second… there is a fundamental difference between the disastrous DOGE project and the apparently similar push by both center right- and left-leaning people to create a more effective and responsive government bureaucracy…. The two approaches differ crucially on the question of who should the government be responsive to? DOGE/AI Thought starts from the premise that bureaucracy should be primarily (perhaps even exclusively) responsive to the people at the top. From this perspective, the problem that AI solves is a mixture of regular institutional inertia and specific “deep state” resistance…. The effective government bureaucracy people… are not in the business of making sure that Dear Leader’s commands get implemented as they ought. Instead, they are primarily interested in freeing bureaucrats to do things that are obviously the right things to do, rather than burying them beneath the concrete of top down mandates. The impulse, then, is to trust bureaucrats more, and give them the means and autonomy to respond to obvious needs. This involves creating better feedback loops between top and bottom, so that measures, tools and perhaps even goals are redefined as the problem becomes better understood. But it also means creating interfaces through which bureaucrats can engage more with the public, and respond better and more quickly to public demands, as well as helping them work sideways with others in the bureaucracy who have necessary skills and knowledge, without getting smothered in red tape. The general bet is not on better subjugating bureaucrats, but on making them more autonomous. This is more or less the opposite of DOGE.… Anyway - these are side notes to a larger argument. If you are interested, do read the piece itself!… Brad DeLong back again: What do I think? I think the sharp Henry Farrell has, if you look across his writings for the past year and a half, built obne of the most illuminating accounts we have of what the Musk-Trump DOGE effort was and all of the damage it has done, as well as of the underlying intellectual rot that made it possible. Let me try to synthesize, because I think he has gotten hold of something that most of the commentariat has missed. And let me put it behind the paywall for now, because I am not sure that it is right”