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Adaptation · Labour & consumers

Workers highly exposed to AI with low adaptive capacity

Number of US workers who are both in the top exposure quartile and have low measured capacity to move occupations, from Manning and Aguirre's NBER working paper (January 2026).

Reason through this

The reading

6.1 million, or 4.2% of the sample, in the working paper; the NBER chapter page still carries an earlier draft's 3.3 million, which this indicator read until 22 Sep 2026. One estimate, one method.

Every readingeach dot links to its record
workers
us workers · 6,100,000 workers · 2026-01-31 · estimate
a readingnormal rangefast range
estimate

1 reading drawn from nber.us_workers.high_exposure_low_adaptive_capacity.pt; 1 observation in the evidence.

Source: NBER working papers and chapters. NBER.

The numbers
as ofreadingvaluerecord
2026-01-31us workers6,100,000 workersestimate

Why it matters

Displacement is a distribution question. The workers who cannot adapt are where a fast scenario turns from a productivity story into a welfare one.

What cuts against it

Single source (tier 6); exposure and adaptive capacity are both modelled; the chapter page and the working paper give different totals, so the figure has already been revised once.

How it is measured
  • series nber.us_workers.high_exposure_low_adaptive_capacity.pt
  • source NBER working papers and chapters · default tier 6 · NBER; abstract quotation
  • proxy welfare · cadence annual · valve adoption to adaptation

Normal = under five million workers (about 3% of the workforce), the scale of the China trade shock spread over a decade; fast = ten million or more. Between is `emerging`.

Applied to nber.us_workers.high_exposure_low_adaptive_capacity.pt.

Latest readings
Why this status, and its history

First scoring. 3.3 million US workers are both highly exposed and low in adaptive capacity (Manning and Aguirre, NBER chapter, Jan 2026), inside the normal band; a single tier-6 estimate cannot score under the two-source rule, so emerging.

  1. 2026-09-10unmeasured to emergingconf — → 45 · the evaluator (automatic)

    First scoring. 3.3 million US workers are both highly exposed and low in adaptive capacity (Manning and Aguirre, NBER chapter, Jan 2026), inside the normal band; a single tier-6 estimate cannot score under the two-source rule, so emerging.

    source1
Why this confidence

Rests on 1 observation from NBER working papers and chapters; best evidence tier 6, grade C; current.

Confidence is independent of status: 90–95 multiple strong independent sources; 70–89 good evidence, some ambiguity; 50–69 mixed or hard to operationalise; 0–49 limited or vague evidence.