A Harvard economist launches an economics site built with AI

Jason Furman’s free Econvitals tracks the economy and the Fed. He built it largely with Claude, and says AI research papers are getting good.

What happened

• On October 23, Jason Furman, Harvard economist and once President Obama’s chief economic adviser, launched Econvitals, a free website with e-mail lists that tracks the US economy.
• He built it in his spare time with a little help from research assistants, a lot of help from Anthropic’s Claude, and some cross-checking by OpenAI’s Codex. The site scores Federal Reserve officials’ speeches as hawkish (for higher rates) or dovish (for lower rates) and follows how each one shifts, tracks GDP estimates, and sums up new data and research.
• Furman says no single part of the site is new, but neither is most economic analysis. He also shows sample economics papers written entirely by AI from short prompts. Done carefully, he says, AI output is more factually reliable than a human’s, though it still lacks creative insight.

Why it matters for you

If you analyse economic data or write papers, this is a picture of your own work in 2026: one person plus an AI assistant can build and keep up a data pipeline, a tracker and a weekly digest that once needed a research team. The scarce skill moves from running the numbers to choosing the question and checking the answer. Furman’s hope is better papers, not more papers.

Sources

• AI economic research is getting really good, Axios, October 23, 2026.
• AI is getting remarkably good at economic research, Mezha, October 23, 2026.

Notes for learning. Nothing here is investment advice. All news