Jason Furman: if he ran the White House CEA today, he would 'somewhat regretfully' pick AI over 20 PhD economists
What happened? Harvard economist Jason Furman, the top White House economist under President Obama, told Axios on 23 October 2026 that AI tools have become far better at the everyday work of economic research and analysis than many people appreciate. "Every conversation I have with a colleague at Harvard or a think tanker in D.C. is some combination of excitement, angst and confusion," he said.
Built with Claude: Furman launched Econvitals, a free site of US economic data and analysis, the same day. Axios reports he built it in his spare time with a little help from research assistants and a lot of help from Anthropic's Claude, with some cross-checking by OpenAI's Codex. It includes AI analysis of how hawkish or dovish each Federal Reserve official is, plus email notes on new research and data, work that Axios says used to take thousands of person-hours and a seven-figure budget.
The quote: "If I were running the CEA today and had a choice between 20 staff members who had a combination of current Ph.D.s and future Ph.D.s versus the AI systems that we have today, I would somewhat regretfully and sadly choose the AI systems," Furman said. People would still be needed for meetings, the press and Congress, but "for the bigger fraction of it, at this point I think machines are faster and more reliable than humans." On reliability, he said models with fact-checking agents are, if done properly, better than any human, though AI is "still not as creative and exciting as the best humans."
The view from below: Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal shared the interview alongside a Reddit thread in which an economics PhD student says Claude now does most of the coding, analysis and drafting on a paper, and a faculty member replies that Opus 5.5 is a better coder than they are. Furman's advice to students: find work that is distinctive, because "repackaging and reinterpreting data and numbers is not that unique."
Sources: Axios · Econvitals · Joe Weisenthal on X
Image credit: Xuthoria / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
