The Professor and the Plutocrat and AI

Regarding the unequal terrain of the Ideas Industry.

Photo by Steve A Johnson on Unsplash

As the summer of 2026 comes to a close and as students head back to their campuses, there will be yet more consternation about whether we have reached a post-literate age and the contested role of artificial intelligence in the ivory tower.

As Fletcher’s Academic Dean I have had to wrestle inconclusively with these issues. I am still struggling to arrive at concrete policies. As the technology keeps changing, however, I am increasingly of the opinion that:

1. AI can be an extremely useful tool for all kinds of academic research and tasks;

2. AI can also be a tempting shortcut for a lot of the necessary work that goes into quality research and writing;

3. Without a well-developed set of critical thinking skills, AI outputs will yield variegated results at best;

4. Professors are increasingly wary of students using AI to complete assignments and are therefore switching to other modes of grading (bluebooks, oral exams);

5. I am extremely concerned that this trend will eliminate paper-writing as an assignment, and that is a core function of most professions requiring a graduate degree.

Before thinking about how students should use artificial intelligence, however, I want to note two recent Ideas Industry instances in which a writer used AI — and the very different reactions these two cases provoked.

The first involves Harvard Kennedy School professor Ricardo Hausmann. Two weeks ago he published a Financial Times op-ed criticizing the Trump administration’s recent tariffs, arguing that they interfere with what Hausman calls the “dark matter” that yields invisible returns on U.S. private investments abroad: “A tariff on those imports is therefore, to a first approximation, a tax levied by the US government on the foreign earnings of US companies. The likelier corporate response — redomiciling the intellectual property to America — would narrow the measured trade deficit without moving a single factory. The same bad accounting that started this fight would then declare victory in it.”

This op-ed built on work that Hausmann has done on dark matter in the global balance of payments for more than 20 years.

A few days after the op-ed ran, however, the FT added a statement at the beginning of his essay:

It has come to our attention that AI was used to condense a longer draft of this column prior to submission to the FT and our own editorial involvement. The FT editorial code of conduct specifically prohibits the use of AI in the writing process.

This generated a whole raft of critical stories about the brouhaha. The New York Post’s coverage serves up the typical framing, quoting one social media post stating, “'Gotta be the worst AI slop I’ve seen in a major publication,” and then tut-tutting for a few paragraphs:

At a time when many in academia are fighting back against growing numbers of students relying on AI for their work, the idea of a top Harvard Kennedy School of Government academic using the technology for their work was particularly dispiriting.

“It’s going to be very difficult this academic year trying to encourage students to write persuasively with creativity, individuality, and style… when a star Econ professor at Harvard Kennedy School publishes such easily ID’ed AI slop in the Financial Times,” bemoaned Michael Socolow of the University of Maine in a social media post.

No doubt, Hausmann’s failure to adhere to the FT’s stated guidelines represents a clear ethical foul. The scope of the foul, however, is less clear cut. Poynter’s Ren LaForme asks a valid question: “If Hausmann did the reporting, developed the argument and wrote the original column, but AI was then used to make it shorter, how different is that from using AI to tighten a sentence or cut 200 words from a draft? When does an editing tool become a writing tool?”

The immediate calumny heaped on Hausman provided its own answer: as far as the Ideas Industry was concerned, a professor — even a professor of the practice¹ — leaning on AI for public intellectual work represents an unpardonable sin.

Fast forward a week or two and another op-ed critical of the Trump administration appeared on the scene. This one ran in the Wall Street Journal, and carried more bite because Stanley Druckenmiller wrote it. Druckenmiller is the chairman and CEO of Duquesne Family Office and former mentor to U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

Entitled “Let the Bond Market Speak,” Druckenmiller blasted Bessent’s intervention into the long-term Treasury market last week:

The long-term Treasury yield is the most important price in the world. It is also the only fiscal disciplinarian the U.S. has left. Neither party will run on entitlement reform. Both have spent the past decade expanding commitments while ignoring arithmetic. Democracies don’t repair their finances because a budget office publishes a table. They repair them only when the cost of inaction becomes visible and immediate, when mortgage rates bite, when auctions tail, when the political price of a rising long bond finally exceeds the political price of touching spending.

Every basis point of artificial yield suppression is a subsidy to procrastination. Suppressed long rates sugarcoat the interest-cost projections, shrink the apparent urgency, and let incumbents assure voters the debt is someone else’s problem. If Congress and the administration are unlikely to touch entitlements even with the market’s signal, they are certain not to touch them without one. Whatever this operation saves in basis points, it will cost multiples in delay.

Yield management always begins as a technical operation and ends as a policy commitment….

Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose. The only variable is how much they spend before conceding. The U.S. shouldn’t put itself on the wrong side of that trade, not with the most important price in the world, and not when that price is trying to say the one thing Washington most needs to hear: Let the bond market speak.

As with Hausman, however, AI played a role in composing this op-ed. After a bunch of folks on social media suggested this possibility, NOTUS’ Jeff Stein interviewed Druckenmiller. He didn’t just cop to it but gloried in it:

Druckenmiller said “of course I used AI” when writing the column, and argued he didn’t see a problem with doing so.

“There’s a reason I moved from an English major to being an economics major,” Druckenmiller said. “I’m not embarrassed by it … I write everything using AI now for the same reason I use a calculator when I do math problems.”

Furthermore, the WSJ op-ed page reacted differently than the FT, as Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré reported:

In a statement to Semafor‘s Max Tani calling AI a “fact of modern life,” WSJ opinion editor Paul Gigot agreed that because the op-ed reflected the trader’s “genuine opinion,” it was alright to publish the article without AI disclosures.

“People will use it to assist in their work and their writing, including with research, checking grammar, editing and more. The question for us is whether what we publish from contributors reflects an author’s original argument, and if the author has the standing and credibility to make it,” said Gigot. “In Stan Druckenmiller’s case, we have had a relationship with him for many years, and nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion.”….

Whereas the NYT took a more restrictive path in the face of AI use by non-staff writers, the WSJ has drawn a very different line in the sand — and in the process, has given a thumbs-up on extensive AI use to other contributors to the paper’s competitive opinion section. As Tani remarked, it’s a “precedent-setting moment in news media.”

“The editor of the second most important opinion page in the country greenlights the use of AI for drafting pieces,” Tani added, “no disclosure necessary.”

The follow-on press coverage of Druckenmiller’s AI use was far less critical of his use of AI. For example, Axios’ Emily Peck wrote a piece titled, “Stanley Druckenmiller makes AI writing a billionaire flex,” suggesting, “The moment could mark a real cultural shift where AI writing is basically all good, at least among a certain set of influential elites… Many folks on ‘fintwits,’ the finance community on X, formerly known as Twitter, not only seemed willing to overlook the method, but praised it… For the most part, plenty of billionaires already employ ghostwriters to spin up their op-eds, LinkedIn musings and social media posts. Transitioning to AI seems like a natural progression.”²

Peck, Dupré, and other writers all noted the Hausmann example when discussing Druckenmiller’s case — but none of them explained why the reaction was so different for the Harvard professor versus the billionaire financier.³

I could ask ChatGPT or Claude to condense my Ideas Industry-length explanation of the marketplace of ideas into a few pithy paragraphs, but I think the explanation for this variance in reactions is pretty simple.

First, there is the simple fact that Hausmann failed to adhere to the FT’s guidelines, whereas it seems Druckenmller did commit the same infraction for the WSJ.

That is a factor but not the factor in the different responses. The factor is that Hausman is a professor and Druckenmller is a plutocrat, and the 21st century Ideas Industry favors the latter over the former. What seems like an ethical no-no for academics is viewed as a neat efficiency trick for billionaires.

Is this fair? It would seem not, but… maybe?! The comparative advantage of professors in the Ideas Industry is supposed to be their ability to take complex ideas and nuanced research and distill their body of knowledge into arguments that lay readers can comprehend. If this is their primary job, readers expect them to put in the work. The same standard is not expected of the tycoon class, who can hire folks to convert their utterances into prose.⁴

The thing is, though, that this is actually something of a double standard. The dirty secret is that many professors do not write their own op-eds. Bigwig profs — especially economists and physical scientists — have research assistants and university comms professionals who can help with that.⁵ Is relying on AI really all that different than a plutocrat relying on a ghostwriter?

As with AI’s overall role in higher education, I do not have a neat and clean answer. But I do think that, for now, expecting a higher standard of academics is both unfair and nonetheless a good thing. Professors should be held to a higher standard. When they weigh in on public affairs, they should exercise influence because of their scholarly expertise and not the size of their bank account. And as a fellow public intellectual, I’d like to zealously protect the brand of academics writing for a public audience.

Plutocrats are welcome to use AI in the drafting of their WSJ op-eds. But if professors think that same gambit is available to them, the events of the past few weeks should disabuse them of that notion.

That is a double standard. For now, however, I think it’s a norm worth preserving.

1. Hausmann is an economist’s economist but he also served as Venezuela’s minister of planning a generation ago.

2. In case you were wondering, Peck did not write that other Axios piece that exercised so many intellectuals.

3. The less said about think tanks and AI the better.

4. This does not mean that all plutocrats are like Druckenmiller. The proliferation of plutocrat manifestoes supports another argument I made in the Ideas Industry: many plutocrats want to be taken seriously as intellectuals.

5. For the record, none of the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World fits that description.