Roger Bootle

Published: 15 Mar 2026

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Age of the Robot

The AI Economy book cover

An attempted analysis of AI through the lens of the economy, attempting to ask many difficult, yet reasonably tangible (i.e. what do my future job prospects look like? How will the economy fare as a whole? How should the government handle AI in a globally-connected world?) questions. It reasons around and provides a logical economic framework, albeit entirely through the lens of straight-laced orthodox economics, and uses this to reason across what could possibly happen, sometimes stretching itself a little thin at points (e.g. jobs of the future, a re-thinking of the education system etc.) in doing so. There’s plenty of interesting stuff here, some directly associated to AI and some not (e.g. historical economic analysis of the Industrial revolution, analyses on how to plug the gap of employment taxes and UBI etc.) - however it has already become outdated in spots (purely due to the nature of how quickly ML/AI has progressed, both in research and commercially) and I continually struggled with the, sometimes implicit, assumptions that the orthodox economics relied on, namely everything ranging from the individual up to large corporations and governments would all attempt to prioritise the collective wellbeing of the populous - its a tough sell given the general attitudes from both a corporate and governmental level is replacing as many workers as possible with AI… without any of the supporting structure to keep the social contract alive, but I suppose time will tell - I just wish I could be as reasonably optimistic about the future as Bootle appears to be here.