May 9, 2026
A new Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas chart has been making the rounds in policy and investment circles, and it's easy to see why. The chart maps four possible paths for U.S. GDP per capita through 2050. One projection shoots vertical toward post-scarcity abundance. Another collapses to zero, labeled "extinction." The realistic middle path adds about 0.3 percentage points to annual productivity growth.
The June 2025 article (revised in November) is by Dallas Fed VP and associate director of research Mark Wynne and research analyst Lillian Derr. The standard disclaimer applies — "the views expressed are those of the authors and should not be attributed to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas or the Federal Reserve System" (1). Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark has shared it. The Financial Times has cited it. Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid built a recent client note around it (8).
What the chart shows
The historical line on Wynne and Derr's chart runs from 1870 to 2024. Over that span, U.S. GDP per capita has grown at approximately 1.9% a year, despite two world wars, the Great Depression, the Great Recession and major technological advances such as electrification, the internal combustion engine and computerization (1). What stands out across 150-plus years of data is how steady the line is.
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From 2024, four projection scenarios fan out to 2050: trend growth with no AI effect, a modest AI boost, an upside singularity, and a downside singularity.
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The boring middle
The trend line continues at 1.9%. The "reasonable" AI scenario lifts that to 2.1% — a 0.3 percentage point boost over a decade.
By 2050, that works out to a difference in GDP per capita of only a few thousand dollars (1). Not nothing, but not earth-shattering.
Run the math: the AI bump is roughly $2,900 more per American per year by 2050, or more than $1 trillion in additional annual U.S. GDP. That's real money — bigger than the current annual economic output of countries like Saudi Arabia or Switzerland. It's just nowhere near what AI's loudest believers are promising.
The 0.3pp figure isn't Wynne and Derr's. It comes from Goldman Sachs, which estimated AI's productivity boost at anywhere between 0.3 and 3.0 percentage points a year over the next decade, with a median of 1.5 (1, 2). The Dallas Fed went with the floor of that range.
The middle of Goldman's range would deliver a productivity boost five times larger. Compounded over a decade, 1.5pp would put AI's productivity bump on par with the IT boom of the late 1990s. The Fed's chart shows only one realistic line, so that range never appears.
The utopia line
The third line is an exponential curve where output per worker accelerates far beyond historic norms. The Dallas Fed authors say there's little empirical evidence to put much weight on either of the extreme scenarios (1).
Believers: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has written essays predicting a coming "Intelligence Age" of "massive prosperity," with superintelligence possibly "a few thousand days" away (3). Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has sketched a "compressed 21st century" in which AI delivers 50 to 100 years of biological and medical progress in 5 to 10 years (4). Tesla CEO Elon Musk has gone furthest, predicting a world of "universal high income" where "AI/Robotics will mean everyone can have a penthouse if they want."
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Detractors: The Dallas Fed authors themselves dismiss putting weight on this curve. Sanjeev Sanyal, a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India, warned Musk's universal high income proposal would bankrupt any country that attempts it.
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The extinction line
The fourth line collapses. This is the scenario where advanced AI development goes wrong at civilizational scale.
Believers: In May 2023, hundreds of researchers signed a single-sentence statement organized by the Center for AI Safety: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war" (5). Signatories include Turing Award winners and AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, and Bill Gates.
AI Impacts' 2023 survey of 2,778 AI researchers — the largest ever conducted — found a median 5% probability of "extremely bad" long-run outcomes such as human extinction, with 38% of respondents putting at least a 10% chance on such outcomes (6).
Detractors: Meta leadership notably did not sign the CAIS letter. The Dallas Fed authors again say there's little empirical evidence to weight this scenario.
Even the boring case might be wishful thinking
In March 2026, Goldman Sachs senior U.S. economist Ronnie Walker, analyzing fourth-quarter earnings across corporate America, wrote that the bank still does "not find a meaningful relationship between productivity and AI adoption at the economy-wide level" (7).
The supporting numbers: fewer than 20% of U.S. establishments are currently using AI for any business function, and Goldman estimates the net impact of AI capex spending on GDP growth at a minimal 0.1 to 0.2 percentage points, owing to a heavy reliance on imported capital goods (7). The bank did find localized productivity gains of around 30% in coding and customer service work, but no macro-level signal.
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In 2023, Goldman told clients AI could lift productivity growth by 1.5pp a year and add nearly $7 trillion to global GDP. Three years later, the same bank's earnings analysts can't find AI showing up in the macro data — even as Goldman's own economists still expect the productivity boom to start landing in 2027. The Dallas Fed chart leans on the optimistic end of Goldman's earlier range; the same firm's current read is that the payoff is delayed, not cancelled.
Deutsche Bank's head of macro and thematic research, Jim Reid, has flagged a third scenario the Dallas Fed didn't chart: AI turning out to be "a damp squib, with a bursting or slow deflation of the AI bubble and negligible gains in productivity" (8).
What it means for you
If you've watched the Magnificent 7 carry your portfolio for the past two years, the chart has a quiet warning embedded in it. The Fed's "reasonable" AI scenario assumes productivity gains roughly five times smaller than what Goldman's median forecast implied in 2023. Markets, on the other hand, have largely priced in the bullish end of that range.
A few things to keep in mind:
- AI exposure in your portfolio is probably higher than you think. The S&P 500's gains this year have been driven mostly by a handful of AI-linked names. If macro AI productivity disappoints, the concentration cuts both ways.
- Productivity gains, where they exist, are narrow. Goldman found 30% productivity boosts in coding and customer service, but nothing economy-wide. If your industry isn't on that short list, the AI bump may not reach your wages or job market anytime soon.
- The "boring" scenario is still the most likely one. A 0.3pp productivity bump over a decade isn't going to fund early retirement. Long-term financial planning shouldn't bake in an AI windfall the data doesn't support yet.
The bottom line
The chart's real message isn't extinction or utopia. The most plausible AI future, according to Fed economists, looks like every other technology revolution before it — a small bump on a 150-year line. And as of right now, even that bump isn't showing up in the data.
So if you're investing, hiring, or planning around the assumption that AI is about to rewrite the economy, the Fed's own chart is telling you to slow down.
Article sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (1); Goldman Sachs (2); Fortune (3, 7); Dario Amodei (4); Center for AI Safety (5); AI Impacts (6); Deutsche Bank Research (8)
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Rudro is an Editor with Moneywise. His work has appeared on Yahoo Finance, MSN, MSN Money, Apple News, Samsung News and the San Diego Union Tribune.
