Press

For years, the conventional wisdom about young workers has been: Gen Z doesn't want a traditional career. They'd rather freelance, day-trade, chase side hustles, and treat a 9-to-5 as a relic that their parents clung to. Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman has spent decades testing that kind of assumption against hard labor-market data, and in his new book "Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment," he says the evidence points in the opposite direction. "Is that rhetoric really reflected in the attitudes of younger people?" Osterman asked. "The evidence is that it's absolutely not."

The price of the tokens by which corporates pay frontier labs for AI usage has been falling dramatically for months now. For research affiliate Paul Kedrosky, token pricing represents "the first hyperdeflationary commodity in the history of modern economies" because, whether or not they come into contact with other parts of the economy, "they do huge damage to it," causing price deflation. With these falling token prices, Kedrosky calculates that frontier model companies must achieve 400% annual unit growth "just to stand still financially," he said.

Principal research scientist Andrew McAfee said: "If you can't successfully address the fundamental fact of Moore's Law — the rule that the number of transistors on silicon chips doubles every 18 to 24 months — you're just not going to be around for long. The business model that we developed for running a company in the 20th century doesn't work in the digital, hardware, software, or networking industries."

Kevin M. Warsh made his first appearance as the Federal Reserve's chairman at its annual conference in Jackson, Wyoming. "He was very clear: He is not telling us what he's doing at the next meeting," said professor Kristin Forbes. Still, Ms. Forbes conceded that Mr. Warsh was in a "tricky situation" as he contends with the market's reactions.

Senior lecturer Phil Budden said organizations can get lost in the excitement over the latest version of generative or agentic AI technology and "forget what's going on in the background. It turns out that the fancy AI model at the top of the stack is based on data stored in some traditional data centers, and it matters where those data centers are," Budden said. "If you have a data center in the Emirates and somebody starts a war in the Gulf, that may become a target."

In his new book, "No One Works Here," senior lecturer Paul Cheek urges managers and business leaders to think twice before throwing a roadblock into the flow of what could be very efficient automation. "The companies that are most likely to fall behind their peers are the ones that insist on keeping a human in the loop for decisions that a machine could have made yesterday," he wrote.