Skip to content
Slow Variables

Ask the data

Answers come from the same store as the site; every number is checked against the record it cites.

Adaptation · Labour & consumers

Workers highly exposed to AI with low adaptive capacity

emerging45/95 confidence, limited or vaguegrade Bleading

1What this measures

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 chapter (January 2026).

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.

Proxy types
welfare
Unit
workers
Cadence
annual
Valve
adoption to adaptation

2How we track this

Normal band
≤ 5,000,000 workers
Fast band
≥ 10,000,000 workers
Falsifying
—

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.

3Tracker interpretation

3.3 million, or 2.5% of the sample. One estimate, one method; the working-paper version revises the split.

4Evidence

Latest point
3,300,000 workersas of 2026-01-31
us_workers
Value the bands apply to
3,300,000 workersas of 2026-01-31

1 observations. Hollow points are disputed (see counterevidence). Every point links to its observation.

5Status and reasoning

emergingsince 2026-09-10 · evaluate

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.

6Timeline notes

7Counterevidence

What cuts against this reading

Single source (tier 6); exposure and adaptive capacity are both modelled; the WP 34705 abstract gives different totals from the chapter page.

8Update history

  1. 2026-09-10unmeasured to emergingconf — → 45 · evaluate

    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.

    obs:d811ea68

9Confidence

45 / 95 — limited or vague evidence

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

10Related