Seth Gordon Benzell

This project received support from the Harvard Business School. There are no financial relationships or other potential conflicts of interest that apply to any of the authors. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Copy Citation Seth Gordon Benzell and Kyle R. Myers, "Automation Experiments and Inequality," NBER Working Paper 34668 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w34668.

In early 2015, I found myself presenting economic projections, via simultaneous translation, to an audience of po-faced Russian economists gathered in Moscow. We had gathered there at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration for an annual event where the government sets its economic agenda. But the audience wasn’t interested in our projections, which had been made just before the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Western sanctions that followed.