Tyler Cowen · George Mason University · Marginal Revolution · 2025-08-07
Cowen's short post on the Collis-Brynjolfsson finding is the single best frame for the "where is the AI revenue?" question that has dominated 2025 markets. The answer, he argues, is that most of the value has already been captured — just by users, not by labs — and conventional GDP-style accounting is structurally blind to it.
A learner gets two things here. First, a usable economic concept (consumer surplus) for thinking about why free chatbots can be transformative without showing up in the income statement. Second, a model of how Cowen reads AI generally: closely, briefly, and with the priors of a working economist rather than a futurist.
> Americans already enjoyed roughly $97 billion in consumer surplus from generative AI tools in 2024 alone.