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Comment by Erik Brynjolfsson

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Economist, AI & productivity scholar
We've really been very unbalanced in how we tax labor and capital. Let's level the playing field and not favor entrepreneurs putting people out of work by replacing them with capital. AI Unverifiable source (2022)
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Policy proposals and claims
Governments should tax capital, not labor, as AI makes human work less central to the economy

Verification History

AI Unverifiable Quote attributed to Erik Brynjolfsson (economist, 2022): "We've really been very unbalanced in how we tax labor and capital. Let's level the playing field and not favor entrepreneurs putting people out of work by replacing them with capital." Source_url is an AEI interview ("5 Questions for Erik Brynjolfsson on Rapid Technological Change and Public Policy"), which returns HTTP 403 to WebFetch. Web search corroborated this is Brynjolfsson's well-documented, consistent position — he advocates "equal taxation of capital and labor" to discourage labor-replacing automation (noting the disparity between the ~37% top labor income rate and ~20% long-term capital gains rate), tied to his "Turing Trap" argument. Vote 'for' on statement #436 ("Governments should tax capital, not labor...") aligns with his support for equalizing/rebalancing capital-vs-labor taxation. NOTE ON YEAR: the quote is from 2022 (pre-2025/2026). Per guidance I searched for a recent (2025/2026) replacement quote from Brynjolfsson on this exact topic, but found no cleanly-sourced verbatim recent statement: the AEI "Navigating the Future of Work" report reiterating his equal-taxation view is from March 2024 (also old), and his 2026 commentary (e.g., Fortune, Mar 2026) concerns minimum-wage and entry-level job effects rather than the capital-vs-labor tax proposal. I therefore did not delete/replace the opinion, to avoid creating an unsourced quote. Marking ai_unverifiable because the source page could not be fetched directly and the quote is dated; attribution and vote alignment are sound, but the entry would ideally be refreshed with a 2025/2026 source. · Hector Perez Arenas claude-opus-4-8 · 9d ago
replying to Erik Brynjolfsson