ERES 2026 Keynote: Economist Andrew Samwick on What's Ahead

Bellevue Chamber Staff  |  April 2, 2026

Dartmouth economist Andrew Samwick closed the 2026 Eastside Real Estate Symposium with a wide-ranging keynote covering federal fiscal policy, the real impact of AI on employment, and the structural advantages that position the Eastside for continued growth. Introduced by his brother Matthew Samwick, CEO of Innovation Realty Partners, Samwick brought an academic lens and a self-described pessimist's candor to a room that had spent the morning focused on local wins.

FISCAL HEADWINDS

Samwick opened with a sobering look at federal finances. Before the recent reconciliation bill, the U.S. was running a deficit of 6.4% of GDP, with $4.9 trillion in revenues against $6.8 trillion in spending. The reconciliation bill added an average of $340 billion per year to that deficit. Meanwhile, Social Security and Medicare trust funds are heading toward insolvency, which would trigger automatic benefit cuts of 23% to Social Security and 11% to Medicare Part A without congressional action.

"$47 trillion of new household net worth has been created. If you look at the change in federal debt outstanding over that time, it was $23 trillion. So, in a sense, we've mortgaged half of the increase in the wealth of the household sector." — Andrew Samwick, Dartmouth College

The practical consequence for real estate: Elevated financing costs, and upward pressure on interest rates over the next decade. Samwick offered a silver lining, however.

The region's housing challenges are fundamentally supply-side problems, not demand-side. Even during a decade of historically favorable interest rates, housing shortages persisted, suggesting that worsening macro conditions may not derail progress as much as expected.

AI & THE LABOR MARKET

On artificial intelligence, Samwick pushed back against both utopian and apocalyptic predictions. A survey of 6,000 executives across four countries found that firms expect about a one percentage point reduction in employment over the next three years. The more immediate concern, he argued, is that those cuts fall disproportionately on young workers who have not yet been hired, affecting the stepping-stone jobs that lead to productive careers.

"In economics, things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then they happen faster than you thought they could." — Andrew Samwick, Dartmouth College

Samwick used the history of ATMs to illustrate why technology adoption is more nuanced than it appears, since bank teller employment did not decline after ATMs were introduced in the 1970s. Instead, tasks were unbundled and reassigned between humans and machines, and teller jobs grew alongside branch banking. The real disruption came decades later when smartphones eliminated the need for branches altogether. The lesson? AI will reshape tasks at the margin now, but transformative change will come when it fundamentally alters how business is conducted.

THE EASTSIDE'S EDGE

Samwick pointed to several structural advantages for the Eastside: Proximity to nature without sacrificing access to high-productivity sectors, likely net in-migration over the next decade, and the ability to compete for residents who have the freedom to choose where they live. He also flagged stubbornly-low measured productivity in construction as a national challenge, citing research showing that the permitting process alone accounts for about a third of the cost difference between construction costs and final home prices.

In a closing Q&A with Bellevue Chamber CEO Joe Fain, Samwick warned about the intergenerational implications of current fiscal policy, noting that millennials and Gen Z may eventually push back against shouldering debt accumulated by older generations that chose not to tax themselves to pay for their own consumption. His parting advice was to invest in the next generation, steward the region's natural advantages, and stay curious about new technology.

Check out the full video from our 2026 Eastside Real Estate Symposium here!