Bah, all of that is still employing people. Companies have completed almost $1T of stock buybacks this year. Since 2018, with the exception of 2020, that number has been between $800B and $1T every single year. And that number has been more than $500B since the 2008 recession. AI spend is bad but it’s not even close to how much stock buybacks have ruined the employee wages and employment prospects.
No but the point I was making was that AI investments at least generate jobs and allow money to flow to people, stock buybacks don’t even do that and are much bigger in magnitude.
Nobody said they don't, but these are very few highly payed jobs dwarfed by the number of lost jobs due to capital misallocation. That's the point of the OP which for some reason got lost in discussions of unrelated issues like outsourcing.
Besides, a lot of the AI investments go to Taiwan and other Asian countries where all of the AI hardware is made which makes non-AI hardware more expensive too - a huge cost on the economy. The recent Taiwanese factories in the US don't change that.
It’s mildly infuriating that we keep cutting corporate tax rates and using debt to finance public spending instead. That trillion dollars of buybacks would balance the budget with likely minimal impact on GDP (I mean clearly these companies don’t need the money).
