Source: Marginal REVOLUTION
Early evidence suggests generative AI amplifies existing researcher skill hierarchies rather than democratizing research capacity. Elite economists with strong technical foundations extract disproportionate gains while junior researchers and those in lower-resource settings see minimal productivity improvement. This mirrors historical technology adoption patterns where tool mastery correlates with prior advantage, but creates a specific problem for economic research itself: if AI accelerates output inequality among the people studying inequality, the field's ability to detect and diagnose distributional problems may become structurally compromised. The consequences extend beyond academia. Skewed research productivity feeds into policy analysis, forecasting, and economic modeling that governments and institutions rely on.