Your Views on Grade Inflation, Harvard Extension School, and Climate Fiction

Grade Inflation

As a college professor, I have long felt uneasy about grade inflation without being quite sure whether there was any real cause for concern. Lindsay Mitchell’s essay helpfully shows that grade inflation does indeed have negative consequences for students (“The Last A’s You’ll Ever Need,” March-April 2026, page 24). However, in order to address the problem effectively, it’s important to understand its causes. While several factors have helped to drive grade inflation, one of the most important is colleges’ widespread reliance on student evaluations of teaching in faculty performance reviews and merit pay determinations.

The reality is that faculty who give higher grades receive higher student evaluations, and as a result faculty face a systematic and intractable conflict of interest. It is not fair or reasonable to expect faculty to solve this problem on their own.

Elizabeth H. Gorman ’80, Ph.D. ’01

As a high school teacher, I am glad that Harvard is taking on grade inflation, but I think if the College wanted to have a greater impact, it should think about the way its own admissions policies have contributed to the problem. If Harvard and other elite colleges rewarded high schools that also held the line on grades—perhaps giving a bonus to schools that also limited their A’s to 20 percent of the total—and if they seriously committed to looking at students whose grades were not perfect, understanding that strict grading is part of the learning experience and not everyone peaks right away, Harvard would do more to improve education in this country than by merely focusing on the grades that it assigns. Grade inflation is undermining secondary education in this country, and the race to impress schools like Harvard is more to blame than any other factor.

Melissa Glenn Haber ’91

I had a student complain about the B grade given him in my financial markets course. After re-examining his paper with a sharp red pencil, noting both omissions and errors, I invited him to my office to discuss it. We went through the corrected version line by line and about halfway through he apologized and said he was lucky he didn’t get a C.

Thomas J. Healey, M.B.A. ’66
Senior Fellow, Harvard 
Kennedy School

I read with great interest Lindsay Mitchell’s article on the devastating impact of grade inflation at Harvard. But I was disappointed that she makes no mention of professor of government Harvey C. Mansfield, [now retired,] who waged a courageous but lonely battle against grade inflation for several decades while receiving nothing but scorn. Now everyone admits he was right, but no one will recognize his prophetic voice. I suspect that the reason he has been ignored is that he is a conservative who traced the problem to the hypocrisy of Harvard’s unspoken ideology of “elitist liberalism”—the demand for “equality of result” (as distinguished from “equality of opportunity”).

For years, Professor Mansfield mocked the practice by giving his students two grades: an “honest” grade (not recorded) and an “inflated” grade (recorded, so as not to punish his own students). It would be a fitting tribute for Harvard to create a Harvey Mansfield Chair in Classical Political Philosophy and Conservative Thought in order to carry on his legacy and to begin restoring intellectual integrity to Harvard.

Robert P. Kraynak, Ph.D. ’77

I entered Harvard in the early ’60s with advanced placement in both math and English. I decided I wanted to become a “Renaissance man” and study both subjects. It took one semester of advanced calculus to tell me my mathematics skills were not what I thought them to be. I went on to earn an honors degree in English literature. Overall, my academics at the College involved a whole lot of B grades. Some of these turned out to be very satisfying, however, such as writing an excellent essay to earn a solid B in Henry Kissinger’s Gov 180.

The grading system taught me a lot about what I was good at versus not so good at, and how different skills and subject area knowledge could inform the kind of career I wanted. An A-dominated grading structure wouldn’t have taught me as much about myself.

John Bayne ’66

Reading Lindsay Mitchell’s essay on grade inflation, I was dismayed at the reaction of Harvard students to the threat of any grade less than an A. It seems their prior learning—the years of challenge and success that got them into Harvard—was largely confined to an obsessive pursuit of A’s that continues in college. It betrays a level of intellectual and emotional immaturity and fragility so sharply at variance with their status as top students, as though one part of their brain has been supercharged, while other parts were allowed to atrophy.

What have we done to these kids? Rather than blame them or their professors for such inflation, or attempt to ratchet down the grading curve, let’s work to replace letter grades with measures of excellence or mastery that holistically reflect what will be demanded of our students as they become workers and citizens. In decades of teaching at the graduate level, I was able to make some headway in moving toward authentic assessment, but more needs to be done. The benefit to our students and ourselves will be profound.

Rob Fried, Ed.D. ’76

To understand why the students are so traumatized by the University’s attempt to take their A’s away, one must ask: how did those students get to Harvard in the first place? By winning the resume-building race, of course. American colleges have gaslighted themselves into believing that a high school transcript is a better indicator of academic performance and competence than the scores on standardized tests. Never mind that the grades are coming from diverse schools and are strongly dependent on how well the students use AI to do their homework, not to mention that their teachers are under enormous pressure to give those A’s.

If colleges relied more on standardized test results for their admissions decisions, high school students would have stopped jockeying for those A’s and complaining that their teachers are hard on them. And when those students got into college (Harvard or not), perhaps they would focus their efforts on acquiring actual skills and knowledge, not on keeping those pesky A-minuses (or, god forbid, B’s) off their transcripts. I am not holding my breath.

Boris Korsunsky, Ed.D. ’03

I enjoyed your article on grade inflation. I understand the author’s flippant remark about Exeter, but what you may not appreciate is that, back in the day, Exeter was harder than Harvard. As a graduate of Exeter’s class of ’66, I had a B/B-plus average, which was considered High Honors, and I was elected to cum laude. I received several straight A’s while there, each of which was accompanied home by a letter from the principal for my outstanding achievement.

Tom Ebert ’70

In connection with your article on today’s grade inflation, I would offer a blast from a rather less generous past. The great W. E. B. Du Bois arrived as a Harvard first-year student in the fall of 1888. His overall academic prowess notwithstanding, biographer David Levering Lewis reports that one course, these days known as Expository Writing, nearly undid the young genius: “The weak spot in the first year, surprisingly, was English composition—almost his ‘Waterloo at Harvard.’ He received the first failing grade of his life on a paper (‘I was aghast’). English C, Forensics, was the one compulsory course still required of all degree candidates…The luck of the draw put Du Bois’s essay in the merciless hands of the just-arrived George Kittredge, who exploded in ‘Egad!’s at the top and bottom of it, only simmering down to pen lengthier marginalia after scolding the author for not writing ‘upon regular forensic paper with margins for comments.’”

Perhaps Du Bois should have contrived to matriculate at a later Harvard.

Christopher H. Foreman ’74, Ph.D. ’80

In the fall of 1959, I sat anxiously in Sanders Theatre for the freshman orientation. Various College officials spoke, including McGeorge Bundy, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

I remember him saying, “Ultimately, gentlemen, you are going to have to adjust to Harvard, Harvard is not going to adjust to you.” He had a point. One of the adjustments I had to make was the receipt of B’s and C’s. But that was part of being at Harvard, a college with high standards and many students brighter than me.

We now have a system of higher education with insane tuition costs, students as “customers,” and universities as vendors—a perfect recipe for grade inflation. Just as Harvard is admirably resisting federal control of higher education, it should take the lead in ending grade inflation. That said, I don’t see how limiting the award of A’s but allowing unlimited A-minuses will solve the problem.

Steven Schreiber ’63

From my experience teaching at three large Midwestern state universities, I would say that by far the greatest contributing factor to grade inflation is student evaluation of instruction. It would be hard to overstate the impact of the deal: “I’ll pretend that you’re a good student if you’ll pretend that I’m a good teacher.”

While it is possible to use student evaluation of instruction constructively—both to get a meaningful evaluation and to help the instructor to become a better teacher—what often happens in practice is that some numbers extracted are used by deans, faculty evaluation committees, and hiring committees to help make decisions about salary, promotion, tenure, and hiring.

John Goldwasser ’67

Your story on grade inflation raises an important question about what grades are meant to represent. When high marks become common, they risk signaling reassurance rather than mastery. As a practicing physician, I see how quickly that difference appears outside the classroom. Patients never experience a doctor’s GPA; they experience the doctor’s judgment.

The ability to make careful decisions under pressure, accept responsibility, and deal with uncertainty matters far more than a transcript. Those qualities rarely develop in environments where evaluation is consistently softened. Honest feedback, revision, and sometimes failure are uncomfortable, but they are also part of serious learning.

José Laércio de Araújo Filho

Grade inflation is a problem I considered in my undergraduate thesis at Harvard (“Competition Among Schools: The Market for Educational Signals,” May 1975). College grades provide information to potential employers about student productivity. The temptation to inflate grades is increased in a country with lots of colleges, where employers are unable or unwilling to adjust grades to take into account a school’s reputation for accuracy and stringency of grading.

It seems to me that the economic pressures for schools—on the one hand to entice good students and on the other hand to market those students for positions afterward—are much more powerful forces shaping grading patterns than are the recent zeitgeist or current students’ supposed psychological frailty.

Charles M. Kahn ’74, Ph.D. ’81

While grade inflation has plagued academia for years, nobody seems to be interested in the simplest solution: when posting the final grade on a transcript, the class average should be posted alongside it. This way, those assessing an undergraduate in the future can draw their own conclusions. It might happily remind everyone that a C in the old days used to mean average/pass. It could also remind students how much an A really is worth, relatively speaking.

Laurie Monahan, Ph.D. ’97

Education is not about grades at all. It should be about learning how to think. During my time at Harvard Business School, Kemmons Wilson, who founded Holiday Inn, came to speak to about 300 of us. At the end of his talk, a rather verbose person stood up and asked him whether, since he had not even graduated from high school, having to deal with college students and highly educated individuals ever bothered him. Mr. Wilson thought for two or three seconds and responded, “Well, son, I learned a long time ago that if you ain’t got no education, you gotta use your brains.”

David Morgan, M.B.A. ’68

I would ask, “Why grades at all?” I’ve taught a business course whose mantra is, “You get out of it what you put into it.” For years, we graded students, forced to use the school’s rubrics. When we gave out a B, the student came to us in tears, followed by an irate call from the parent. After that, we only gave A’s.

My fellow teachers and I had many a discussion about the value of grades and concluded the reason we used them was because the school, parents, and students expect them. In other words, grades are a cultural rite of passage, purporting to characterize a student with an artificial, generalized metric, too often relying on memorization. But if the objective is to prepare a young person for the big bad world, aren’t there easier, more relevant ways?

A few years ago, we found that the school would approve changing the course to “credit/no credit” (pass-fail, if you will). By the second group without grades, we found that the mix of top, middle, and low performers was changing for the better. We kept chanting our mantra and reminding them academia is an abstract construct, antithetical to the real world. In any job you’ve ever had, did anyone give you a grade? Spare me. Conclusion: Life is pass-fail!

Brian Barbata, M.B.A. ’75

As a possible solution: The Navy uses a system for yearly evaluations/fitness reports (for officers and enlisted alike) wherein all reporting senior officers are allowed 20 percent as “early promote” (A’s), and another 40 percent as “must promote” (B’s); everyone else in a particular rank is “promotable” or less. Of note, a senior officer is not required to use all those slots; if there aren’t any officers who are exceptional, they are allowed to only give B’s.

On service members’ records, not only are these rankings prominently featured, but it is also made clear how many people an officer or sailor was competing against and what their score was compared to both the group in question and the grader’s overall reporting average over time. So, if someone is looking at that person’s record, they can easily see, “Oh, Captain Ducayet gave them only a 3.5 out of 5, but look, their average is only a 3, so a 3.5 is a top score.”

Ed Ducayet, J.D. ’93

Lindsay Mitchell presents a disturbing picture of Harvard students’ obsession with high grades. She writes about the problem as a consequence of grade inflation. But we need to consider other factors that may contribute to the problem, which extends well beyond Harvard.

To what extent does grade anxiety reflect the premium that our society places on individual achievement (rather than, for instance, caring for others)? Does the problem begin when students are children, when adults give them the sense that their worth is not unconditional, but dependent on their grades? What about the K-12 standards movement? How much has it increased parents’ anxiety with its warnings that their children’s future success depends on high academic performance? And what is the role of social media in promoting the pursuit of perfection? I hope the author’s moving account of grade obsession will stimulate new insights into its causes.

William Crain ’65

As one who agonizes over which grades to hand out, I read with interest the article on grade inflation. Unfortunately, I did not see any discussion of the purpose of grades: a way of communicating the professor’s thoughts about the quality of a student’s efforts. The idea that those thoughts could be so compressed and still represent an accurate picture is foolish. We are grading human beings, not beef or butter.

There is also the audience for the grade. If the audience is the student, a fair question is, what effect will the grade have? Would a high grade encourage a struggling student? Would a low grade push an excellent student to achieve more? If the grade is for an entire course, the audience includes the college as a whole, and the broader world. It is wildly optimistic to think that a reader will arrive at an accurate assessment of a student’s worth by looking at a single letter.

I am not naive enough to believe that grades will disappear; the best the education community can do is to try to get the audience for grades to have at least a vague idea about their weakness.

John H. Gillespie, Ed.D. ’73

After reading “The Last A’s You’ll Ever Need,” a weird idea has come to me on how Harvard might move beyond the present grade-inflated situation without driving students into despair. For a period of a few years, require instructors to give each student two grades: an “inflated grade,” modeled on the grading that has been common over the last few years, and an “uninflated grade.” Looking at their “inflated grades,” students could see that they haven’t suddenly fallen off a cliff. Looking at their “uninflated grades,” they would get more information on how well they are doing.

Hopefully, after a few years, the “inflated grades” could be dropped. This would be especially reasonable if other prestigious universities had begun to follow Harvard’s lead. If in doubt as to whether to make this change at a given time, Harvard might consult some of the institutions to which its students apply, asking them whether the “inflated grades” were still needed alongside the uninflated grades for comparing applicants to those from other universities.

Instructors would doubtless groan at having to assign two grades to each student in each class, and the system by which the University stores and reports student grades would need modification to handle the extra information. But if it would allow Harvard to get out of the inflation mess it is in, it might be worth it.

George Bergman, Ph.D. ’68

Research institutions such as Harvard were always vulnerable to weak pedagogy, and the absence of that acknowledgement is the most glaring failure of Lindsay Mitchell’s mea culpa.

No doubt Harvard is a different place than it was during the period of excellence between 1957, the year of Sputnik’s launch, and 1978, the year the Supreme Court decided Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, when meritocracy, while always imperfect, obtained most fully in the storied history of this institution. The current quid pro quo—students receive nothing lower than an A-minus and faculty and graduate student teaching assistants receive 5s on evaluations—is only one facet, wildly inflated, in Mitchell’s presentation.

Matthew Abelson ’02

Lindsay Mitchell’s article on grade inflation at Harvard absolves faculty members from their responsibility to provide students with honest and accurate evaluations of their work. Professors, instructors, and teaching fellows are presumably grown-ups.

Are they unable to withstand the complaints and whines of anxious and disappointed teenagers, or do they lack sufficient dedication to their teaching professions so that they’re willing to settle for the easy way out?

While I was a Harvard professor, a student came complaining to me about the B I gave to his hourlong exam. “What did I do wrong?” he said. “I’ve never gotten a B before in my life.” I said he’d done nothing wrong; he’d written a good exam. “Then why did I get a B?” he asked. I said that good exams get B’s. He said, “What do I have to do to get an A?” I said he had to write a great exam. On the final, he wrote an excellent exam and got an A (with a star on his blue book). The moral of this story is that Harvard students are smart; if they’re pushed a little, they’re capable of excellent work.

Robert Repetto ’59, Ph.D. ’68

A’s matter so much to students because, like dollars, they have lost their value—bushels of them are required for only a little purchase. Nothing valuable comes from taking the path of least resistance, in awarding meaningless A’s. In my 11 years of teaching, with so few A’s (including A-minuses) awarded, only one student ever complained about not getting an A, and she got an A-minus! When I laughed at her emotional appeal, she smiled, said it was her policy to make such a manipulative effort, and thanked me for the course. Can there be such good will among faculty and students over the prospective A/A-minus divide?

Eric M. Leifer, Ph.D. ’83

Extension School

Thank you for the article on the Harvard Extension School and the opportunity it has offered to thousands whose lives it has transformed (“Harvard’s Egalitarian Education,” March-April 2026, page 30).

In 1953, I had to leave college due to family circumstances. Career opportunities for women were limited, even for those with college degrees. I moved to Boston and got a job as a secretary. I thought I would be a secretary all my days. Then someone told me about HES.

I enrolled in a course just because I was interested in the subject. I enjoyed it and enrolled in another. At some point I found out that I could actually earn a degree. It took me seven years, but I finally graduated. I went on to earn an M.A. at Tufts and enroll in a Radcliffe Seminar on Biography, which led to the publication of my first book in 1978.

I am grateful not only for the fact that HES changed my life, but for the quality of learning it provided, thanks to Harvard professors who gave up their evening hours to teach us. Now, 60-odd years later, I can call up images of B.J. Whiting lecturing on Chaucer, or John Kelleher on Irish literature and history, or Henry Aiken on philosophy. If I still my mind, I can almost hear their voices.

Pauline (Barber) Blanchard ’64
 

I love talking about my experience with HES! I am an Episcopal priest who was serving in Maine in the 1990s. I wanted to do the rigorous work of the academy for a degree, but I was a full-time parish priest and didn’t have the ability or desire to do full-time graduate work.

Then I discovered HES. Once a week I would take a two-hour bus ride from Maine to South Station and then the subway to Cambridge. Three highlights: “Religion and Politics” taught by Paul Hanson, “The Future of the World Religions” taught by Harvey Cox, and a doctoral seminar on the Trinity taught by Sarah Coakley. Oh, and because I am considered an alum of Harvard, I vote annually for the Harvard Board of Overseers.

G. Thomas Luck, A.L.M. ’08

While the Harvard Extension School is “egalitarian” in its mission of access, the exit remains gate-kept by an antiquated naming system and a social culture that does not translate to the equity the University claims to promote. The proposition feels like this: “You are granted access to a Harvard education, but at the cost of never being able to fully leverage or be recognized for it.” In the era of AI-driven recruitment and automated employment screening, the “Extension Studies” label creates a functional disadvantage. When an applicant inputs “Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies” into a digital system, the screening architecture often fails to categorize the degree appropriately. This forces the graduate into a position where they must justify their degree to every single employer.

The fact that students are required to clearly identify a separation of their belonging to Harvard further perpetuates a form of academic discrimination. Unlike the Harvard counterparts whose imposter syndrome stems from internal self-doubt, HES students have it structurally imposed upon them—the institutional mechanisms designed to protect Harvard’s brand simultaneously function as a sustained, external validation of their illegitimacy.

In the end, Harvard is going to have to reckon with the true purpose of HES. The idea of egalitarian education does not hold up if every student who graduates is burdened with the trauma imposed by seeking that education while implicitly agreeing to a career handicap for the benefit of every other Harvard graduate.

Jeremy Robert Welscott Byma, A.L.M. ’22

I graduated in 1970 from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, with a bachelor of fine arts in printmaking (etchings, woodcuts, lithographs, and so forth). 1970 was the year of the killings at Kent State, and the governor of Ohio closed all state schools temporarily for a cooling-off period. Losing a couple weeks of classes so close to graduation meant that something had to go. What we lost in my senior year art history class was the section on German expressionism, which I had been looking forward to all year. I promised myself that if I ever had a chance to take a course on German expressionism, I would do it, but I didn’t have high hopes; it’s kind of a niche subject.

A few years later, I was newly arrived in Cambridge and working as a waitress in Harvard Square. A customer left behind an Extension course catalog. I looked through it, and there was my promised German expressionism course. All I had to do was register and show up. I followed that up with a course on Northern Renaissance art; by then I was totally used to thinking of HES as part of my life. It was about that time tha Harvard instituted the A.L.M. program. I remember thinking, “You’ll give me a master’s degree for doing what I want to do anyway? OK.”

After that I continued taking courses, with no particular guidelines other than, “Oh, that sounds interesting!” I took a couple set design courses, some history of science, a course in existentialism in modern drama. I revived my French, which had lain dormant for years. I took a wonderful course, called “Waves, Particles, and the Structure of Matter,” taught by (then future) Nobel Prize winner Roy Glauber. It’s fascinating to see how much knowledge is right there just waiting for us to discover it.

Jackie Miller, A.L.M. ’83

I accidentally discovered Harvard Extension School back in the 1980s when I overheard a conversation between attorneys in which the one who had taken courses was surprised by how impressed people were with her accomplishment. “They were just correspondence courses” still rings in my ears four decades later. I had just suffered a head injury after which school went from being the thing I did best to one I simply couldn’t do anymore. I eventually discovered a way around my deficits, after which I needed to study neuroscience someplace to understand and talk about what had happened to me. I knew just where to go.

I appreciated the point that earning a degree at HES is a similar “mark of achievement” to gaining admission to the College. I’ve learned like many alumni to shy away from dropping the ‘H-bomb’ on people, but if I could, I’d go a step further away from questions about legitimacy and stand alone in terms of marketing our unique opportunity as simply the Extension School to eliminate confusion.

David Adams, A.L.B. ’25

I graduated with an A.L.B. in extension studies, with a concentration in social science, winning the Reginald H. Phelps First Prize for Academic Achievement and Character. I received an excellent education. I was required to take a certain number of courses with Harvard professors. I spent hours in Widener Library and learned in Harvard classrooms. I suffered through three-hour exams in icy Memorial Hall. I also had the opportunity to talk and listen to other adult students with varied experiences to contribute. When I studied with Extension students, they said, “What did we learn in this course?” When I studied with undergraduates, they said, “What do you think he will ask on the exam?”

Jane Arnold, A.L.B. ’85, M.T.S. ’92

Thank you for publishing a story on Harvard Extension School. I would also like to thank the author of the story, Lydialyle Gibson, for describing the exemplary qualities making Harvard Extension School a welcoming oasis in the University community where we invite people from all walks of life to come to study, become Harvard scholars, and—as she suggests in the profiles of our five friends and colleagues in the Harvard Extension Alumni Association—to teach and mentor. As the story makes clear, HES, one of the four institutions of higher learning in the Division of Continuing Education, continues to realize its longstanding vision and mission as a community of Harvard scholars dedicated to making a positive difference and impact, as it has since its founding in 1910.

As a longtime student of Harvard history, I believe Gibson’s story is one of the kindest, most generous acts of publicity ever by Harvard Magazine, or Harvard University, for HES or continuing education at Harvard. Thank you for your dedication to our University and HES communities—it makes a positive difference and impact in careers and lives.

Mark E. Benson, A.L.M. ’11
 

Climate Fiction

Gabriella Gage’s insight into the importance of climate stories is welcome (“Can Stories Help Us Cope With Climate Change?,”March-April 2026, page 46). Given the sophistication of messaging, ordinary people don’t have the luxury of sorting through competing narratives to discover which are based in fact and which are lobbying efforts. The carbon pollution industries have held the mic for far too long. The real “cli-fi” is told with smoke and mirrors, fear mongering, and denial of hard science. Climate stories allow people to navigate through the fog and find emotional connections to narratives.

George Williams and Anne Bonaparte, M.B.A. ’88

Harvard Fight Songs

In The College Pump (“The Forgotten Harvard Anthem,” January-February 2026, page 54), I noticed a significant omission regarding College football songs: the Tom Lehrer ’46 song “Fight Fiercely Harvard,” a song performed by the Harvard University Band at every game. I first heard his music in a show entitled “Physical Review” in the New Lecture Hall in the early 1950s. I was privileged to substitute for Mr. Lehrer at Mt. Holyoke College in 1954 and have been a fan ever since.

Richard L. Sogg ’52

Getting to Mars

In George Sciallaba’s letter (“Getting the Mars (for Real),”March-April 2026, pages 8 and 10), he seems to think that the $500 billion cost of a Mars expedition will be carried off in the spaceship. All of that money will go to pay people working on the expedition, including engineers, scientists, administrators, and janitors, all of whom have to pay rent, buy donuts, and pay taxes, which cycles to other people.

James Kardon ’71 
 

AI and the Economy

We were surprised to see that the December 2025 article on AI and post-neoliberalism had little to say about AI and central economic planning. Yet the current scholarly and public buzz around AI has prompted reconsideration of issues long thought settled, including the democratic capacity for rational economic planning. Since the rise of AI, Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu, and many others, has wondered, as he puts it: “What if the computational power of central planners improved tremendously?” With enough computing power, perhaps an AI regulator could model an economy, decide what is to be produced or consumed, and solve the “knowledge problem” that doomed twentieth-century planned economies and produced untold suffering.

We suggest a fatal flaw in this renewed optimism: if an authority possesses AI advanced enough to manage the economy, millions of dispersed actors will also deploy AI to pursue their idiosyncratic goals. This proliferation will make the economy more complex and thus harder to model. Seen in this light, AI advances will make the central planner’s task less viable, not more. Worse still, the private information required for AI-driven planning would demand mass surveillance of virtually (perhaps exactly) every economic choice, of our fleeting expressions of attention, and of even our most minor behaviors and preferences. Deploying such data in planning would also require outsourcing to machines the individual acts of valuation that create market prices in the first place. Even setting aside the dangers of powerful AI falling into the wrong hands, we should think twice before we risk letting machines displace our humanity. The danger here is that of atrophying the human capacity for generating personal valuations, in markets and beyond, that makes life meaningful.

Gregory Robson, A.L.M. ’08, Andrew M. Bailey, and Justin Tosi