Allison Schrager, Columnist

AI May Be the US Economy’s Only Hope

April 28, 2026 at 11:00 AM UTC

Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.”

The AI of its day.
Photographer: Science & Society Picture Librar/SSPL

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If you take the long view, America’s economic outlook is pretty bleak. Like a lot of rich countries, it is overwhelmed by debt it has no plans to reduce. Even more troubling is its aging population, which will reduce growth and leave fewer people to pay all that debt.

There is only one hope: a sudden increase in productivity that will boost growth so much it will pay for everything. As it happens, that is precisely the promise, or one of them, of AI. But what are the chances of it coming true?