AI Threat to Junior Research Jobs economics? Econvitals.
Jason Furman, the former White House chief economist now at Harvard University, caused a stir last month when he said, if he were running the White House Council of Economic Advisers today, he would sadly choose AI models over hiring 20 current and aspiring PhDs.
He later wrote a longer piece acknowledging his comment was provocative. But the main takeaway stood: the kind of work the CEA entails, from tracking data to drafting reports, could mostly be done by AI models now.
It didn’t go unchallenged. Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve and CEA economist, argued that human junior staff are more likely to challenge bad ideas, which is a core mission at the White House agency — making that point in a Bloomberg Opinion column and an “Ode to the Juniors” Substack post.
Where Furman and Sahm agree is that AI is a personal productivity booster for established economists. Furman recently launched Econvitals, an AI-generated macroeconomic dashboard featuring daily briefings. It’s an experiment, which he said was vibe-coded with the help of two Harvard College students.
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