productivity-paradox

Apollo Global Management — The Daily Spark 2026-10-25-1

No Signs of AI Payoff Outside the Tech Sector

Real revenue per worker and profit margins are rising for the Mag 7 and flat for the S&P 493, and the San Francisco Fed's utilization-adjusted TFP shows no AI lift. Because the Mag 7 build and sell the technology, their results can't test whether buyers gain; the 493 can, and Slok's 'great calculator' framing explains why judgment doesn't get cheaper with tokens. The only series still climbing is token spend at VC-backed companies.

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apollo ai-economics enterprise-ai-roi productivity-paradox mag-seven token-economics margins enterprise-ai-adoption commoditization macro

Freddie deBoer (Substack) 2026-10-21-1

Four Direct, Reasonable, and Important AI Questions (Which the AI People Will Ignore)

deBoer holds AI maximalists to their own yardstick and finds daily life in 2026 barely distinguishable from 2021. His best argument is that cancer is limited by tumor recurrence, toxicity and patient dropout, and curing every cancer would add only about three years of life expectancy. That sets the ceiling for Schmidt's claim that disease could be cured in 15-20 years: where the constraint is physical, faster thinking buys little.

# tags

ai-hype ai-philosophy ai-sentiment epistemology rationalism productivity-paradox ai-economics ai-for-science substack contrarian consensus-positioning superintelligence autonomous-vehicles

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Deutsche Bank Research Institute 2026-05-25-2

DB Megatrends: AI vs the Decade's Structural Headwinds — Six-Megatrend Aggregate at 1970s/2008 Lows, Haven Asset Regime Change

DB's megatrend aggregate sits at 1970s/2008 lows, four of six trends deeply negative, and their headline binary — AI productivity boom or severe prolonged downturn — is the rhetorical compression sell-side reaches for when consensus is still forming; their own scenario charts show three lines. Two findings buried under that framing deserve more attention: M&A correlation with megatrends went from near zero during ZIRP to 25-30% now, and traditional havens failed in four consecutive major risk-off events since 2020. The scenario nobody is modeling is the middle one — AI real, productivity capture uneven, fiscal dominance partial — and that's where every corporate treasury policy and institutional hedge structure is quietly becoming obsolete.