---
type: source
title: "Some Simple Economics of AGI"
author: "Christian Catalini, Xiang Hui, Jane Wu"
url: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.20946
date_published: 2026-02-24
date_archived: 2026-03-16
domain: ai-alignment
secondary_domains: [teleological-economics]
status: processing
processed_by: theseus
tags: [verification-bandwidth, economic-bottleneck, measurability-gap, hollow-economy]
sourced_via: "Alex Obadia (@ObadiaAlex) tweet, ARIA Research Scaling Trust programme"
twitter_id: "712705562191011841"
---

# Some Simple Economics of AGI

Catalini et al. frame AGI economics around two competing cost curves. As AI decouples cognition from biology, the marginal cost of measurable execution falls to zero — but this creates a new bottleneck: human verification capacity.

Key framework:
- Verification bandwidth — the ability to validate, audit, and underwrite responsibility — is the binding constraint on AGI growth, not intelligence itself
- This generates a "Measurability Gap" between what systems can execute vs what humans can practically oversee
- Two destabilizing forces: "Missing Junior Loop" (collapse of apprenticeship) and "Codifier's Curse" (experts codifying their own obsolescence)
- These pressures incentivize "unverified deployment" as economically rational, driving toward a "Hollow Economy"
- Solution: scaling verification alongside agentic capabilities to enable an "Augmented Economy"

Directly relevant to [[scalable oversight degrades rapidly as capability gaps grow with debate achieving only 50 percent success at moderate gaps]] — Catalini provides the economic framing for WHY oversight degrades (verification bandwidth is finite while execution capability scales).