Reflecting on Week 3 of my Economics of AI class

This marked the end of my third week for the new Economics of AI class I’m teaching/prepping. I thought I’d give an overview of what we did this week for those interested in possibly teaching a course like this in the future. I’ll try to be succinct. But first - the paywall coin flip simulation! Heads I paywall it and tails I don’t. Drum roll…. It’s heads 4 times out of 5!

Thanks again everyone for supporting the podcast. I hope you enjoy this post!

Labor Markets

As I have said, this class is almost entirely undergrads. And I think said this, too, but it’s also a mixture of majors and non-majors. So, taken together, I did not feel comfortable assuming anything, so I have spent the first two and a half weeks reviewing a lot of basic economics, mostly in macroeconomics and labor markets. But until Tuesday, I had not really on the latter because I took some detours last week talking about Deepseek as well as going a little deeper into production functions and isoquants. But this week I introduced them to labor market equilibrium, as well as read them our first paper by Acemoglu and Johnson. Later I’ll show you how I showed them to use Gen AI to learn the paper as partly I am trying to get them to a place where they are reading, studying and learning harder papers than they could’ve otherwise learned using Gen Ai.

I’ll walk you through the lecture with examples so you can see what I did but point is, we had to review supply and demand, but with a ready interest in AI and technology more generally.