Economist who mixes it up with agriculture, climate change, energy, data, and micro/macro fundamentals. Love the ocean. Swimmer, kook surfer, and lucky Dad.
Honolulu, Hawaii.
Joined September 2009
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New working paper: "Optimal transmission expansion minimally reduces decarbonization costs of U.S. Electricity."
#energytwitter #EconTwitter #decarbonization
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Michael Roberts retweeted
ICE is hunting down immigrants with the help of Palantir.
In six months, Palantir’s founder, @PeterThiel, will be able to start spending unimaginable sums of money —completely tax-free — to bankroll the political causes dear to his heart.
He'll be able to do it thanks to a tax-avoidance scheme he’s been building for more than 20 years, at a staggering cost to the American taxpayer.
Let me explain. 🧵
Michael Roberts retweeted
I'm in an airport, 1 hr before 🛫, the worst time to do this, but here is a thread on permitting/transmission reform bill:
First, if you don't know me, I worked for Greenpeace for 8 yrs campaigning against fossil fuels (esp coal), & have lead a utility watchdog for past 10...
Michael Roberts retweeted
My team and I wrote a blog post about key pieces of the legislative response to the LA wildfires that are now on @GavinNewsom’s desk. We try to organize things conceptually so that you can see how things more or less fit together.
cepp.substack.com/p/the-legi…
Crap. That’s a new line crossed. And a really big one.
The scarier story isn't a president firing a commissioner over bad jobs numbers. It's what happened last week, quietly, with no front-page coverage: our statistical agency actually put out a number shaped to please the president.
That's not a bad data point. That's the loss of a shared source of truth. newsletter.platypuseconomics…
Michael Roberts retweeted
Breaking: U.S. Department of Energy discovers that solar panels do not work when the sun is not out.
“The ironic consequence: the sector that gets automated becomes a smaller share of the economy, not a larger one. Agriculture got massively more productive and its share of employment collapsed. Manufacturing too. The "stagnant" sectors absorb the spending and the jobs.”
New essay on the economics of structural change and the post-commodity future of work.
1. Almost any question about the impact of advanced AI on the economy needs to start at the same place: what is still scarce? Answer that, and the analysis becomes pretty straightforward. This essay explores what becomes scarce if AI really can replicate most of what humans do in production, and what this mean for the future of jobs.
2. My conjecture, working through the economics: labor reallocates across sectors, and the sector it reallocates to has properties that keep labor a meaningful share of the economy. Ultimately this is about the structure of demand itself. For this, we have to go back to Girard, Augustine and Rousseau: once people's base needs are met, their preferences shift to comparative motives (e.g., status, exclusivity, social desirability). This motive is inherently non-satiated.
4. The key paper is Comin, Lashkari, and Mestieri (Econometrica 2021). As people get richer, they don't buy proportionally more of everything. They shift spending toward sectors with higher income elasticity. They estimate income effects account for 75%+ of observed structural change.
5. The ironic consequence: the sector that gets automated becomes a smaller share of the economy, not a larger one. Agriculture got massively more productive and its share of employment collapsed. Manufacturing too. The "stagnant" sectors absorb the spending and the jobs.
6. So the question is: which sectors have high income elasticity in a post-AGI world? I argue it's what I call the relational sector. Categories where the human isn't just an input into production, it is part of the value.
7. Why does the relational sector have high income elasticity? Because human desire has a mimetic, relational dimension. We don't just want things for their intrinsic properties. We want what others want, and we want it more when others can't have it. Girard, Rousseau, Augustine, and Hobbes all saw this.
8. In work with Kristóf Madarász, we showed this experimentally: WTP roughly doubles when a random subset of others is excluded from the good. And in new work with Graelin Mandel, AI involvement kills the premium. Human-made art gains 44% from exclusivity; AI-made art only 21%.
9. This all comes together for the core argument. The sector that absorbs spending as AI makes commodity production cheap is one where human provenance is part of the value, and demand for it grows faster than income. Exactly the profile that keeps labor meaningful.
10. To be clear about the claim: I'm NOT saying aggregate labor share must rise. It may fall. The claim is about sectoral composition, i.e., where expenditure and employment go once commodities get cheap, and the fact that the sector that will absorb reallocated labor maps to a substantial component of human preferences and desire.
11. If you're interested in the formal model, a linked companion technical note works out all the economics.
Read the essay here: aleximas.substack.com/p/what…
Michael Roberts retweeted
Wild symptom of a broken epistemic environment: in 2015 the evidence showed the Clean Power Plan to be a weak, inexpensive regulation. But climate opponents said it would have huge costs, and climate advocates said it would have huge benefits.
And the Chief Justice was fooled.
Michael Roberts retweeted
For 20 years, gas peaker plants were the only option for meeting peak electricity demand.
Now batteries are 24% cheaper
New gas plants are $102/MWh — an all-time high.
Why is gas getting more expensive? AI is buying all the turbines for data centers.
Michael Roberts retweeted
I've been critical of the reliability of EPA's climate benefit estimates, but this statement from WaPo is pure vibes and ideology.
Michael Roberts retweeted
I’m a MN grandmother in my 60s. I have voted Republican all my life. But I’m so appalled and angry. I’m ready to drive to Minneapolis. They can’t kill all of us.
Michael Roberts retweeted
I've never felt this much behind as a programmer. The profession is being dramatically refactored as the bits contributed by the programmer are increasingly sparse and between. I have a sense that I could be 10X more powerful if I just properly string together what has become available over the last ~year and a failure to claim the boost feels decidedly like skill issue. There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and a need to build an all-encompassing mental model for strengths and pitfalls of fundamentally stochastic, fallible, unintelligible and changing entities suddenly intermingled with what used to be good old fashioned engineering. Clearly some powerful alien tool was handed around except it comes with no manual and everyone has to figure out how to hold it and operate it, while the resulting magnitude 9 earthquake is rocking the profession. Roll up your sleeves to not fall behind.
Solar and batteries are so cheap and so easy to site at most any scale. Resistance is futile.
But still they resist.
Michael Roberts retweeted
This is a great piece with some mind-boggling statistics.
- At Brown and Harvard, more than 20% of undergraduates are registered as disabled
- At Amherst: more than 30 percent
- At Stanford: nearly 40 percent
Soon, many of these schools "may have more students receiving [disability] accommodations than not, a scenario that would have seemed absurd just a decade ago."
As students and their parents have recognized the benefits of claiming disability—extended time on tests, housing accommodations, etc—the rates of disability at colleges, and especially at elite colleges, has exploded.
America used to stigmatize disability too severely. Now elite institutions reward it too liberally. It simply does not make any sense to have a policy that declares half of the students at Stanford cognitively disabled and in need of accommodations.
Michael Roberts retweeted
I get pegged as being "anti-China", but this is unironically going to save the world from climate change.
Michael Roberts retweeted
Solar and wind are covering ALL new power demand worldwide in the first three quarters of 2025 electrek.co/2025/11/13/solar…
I didn’t watch this, but these are obviously true points. Africa will electrify faster now with cheap solar and batteries.
A question I’ve had for a while now: how much better off will the rest of the world be with a richer electrified Africa? Can we extrapolate from Asia?
We still hear this argument: “If you reduce fossil fuel production, Africa will never be electrified.”
In this clip from The Energy Capital Podcast, Nat Bullard and I talked about how those talking points ignore the reality on the ground.
For more than a century, fossil fuels have been produced at massive scale. If they were going to bring affordable power to everyone, they would have done it by now.
What is bringing power to places without electricity?
⚡ Solar panels, batteries, and LEDs delivering light, cooling, and power one home, clinic, or community at a time.
⚡ Modular, local systems that grow piece by piece, without waiting for larger infrastructure which may never come.
⚡ Air conditioning and solar peaking together, delivering health and safety in a warming world.
Nat added that no one buying solar panels in Zambia or Malawi, or selling them from China, is waiting for permission from Washington. People around the world don’t care about our fossil fuel debates. They’re doing what works. It would be better if America were involved and helping, but they're not waiting for us.
Distributed solar isn’t charity.
It’s power – literally and figuratively.
👉 Full conversation in the reply.