Jennifer M. Harris, We Are Witnessing the Rise of a New Aristocracy, NYTimes, Apr. 8, 2026.
Inequality is such a fact of American life that it’s easy to shrug off. But we are in uncharted terrain. The amassed wealth of today’s tech titans makes the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts look quaint. Over the past two years, 19 households have added $1.8 trillion to their coffers, the economist Gabriel Zucman told me — roughly the size of the economy of Australia.
Into this fragile state enters artificial intelligence. It threatens to make a bad situation much worse.
Left on its current course, A.I. could deliver a bleak picture: lower- and middle-income jobs automated away, with top earners remaining unscathed. Income shifting from middle-wage workers doing the bulk of the labor toward those wealthy enough to bankroll the technology. Growth headwinds. Worsening affordability. So, too, a federal government less able to respond, thanks to a shrinking tax base.
For any society in which this much wealth gets concentrated in so few hands, and is then so easily parlayed into political clout, the question becomes one not just of economics but of basic civic standing. At some point soon, we are no longer sharing in self-government. [...]
Those losses on the lower half of the scale are underway. One-quarter of computer programming jobs disappeared in 2023 and 2024. IBM’s chief executive said in 2023 he could “easily see” 30 percent of the company’s back office roles getting replaced by A.I. in the next five years. [...] A Stanford study found that early-career employees in A.I.-exposed fields like customer service have seen a 13 percent drop in employment since 2022 — unlike more experienced workers and those in other sectors.
At the same time, premiums for elite graduates with hefty Rolodexes full of powerful people, and tacit knowledge (like how to generate a laugh at a cocktail party on Park Avenue), aren’t going anywhere. Chatbots are no substitute for people who can call the right people when high-stakes deals go awry.
Meanwhile the investor class, which is very small, is making out like bandits:
What’s worse, much of the trillion-plus-dollar investment in the A.I. boom isn’t happening in the stock market at all — it’s happening in private funds out of reach to all but the wealthiest, most connected among us. In earlier technology-fueled booms, companies like Amazon sold their shares in the public markets. As the value of its shares soared, they enriched Amazon’s early investors, yes, but thousands of employees also benefited, as did millions of other Americans, through pension funds and retirement accounts.
That isn’t the case with A.I. Anthropic and OpenAI, the two best-known A.I. companies, raised over $150 billion, mostly from venture capitalists, private equity firms and foreign sovereign wealth funds — funds mostly inaccessible to the vast majority of investors (let alone ordinary Americans).
With ownership of these firms concentrated in so few hands, any wealth they produce widens the gap between the richest households and everyone else. Also consider the fact that today’s A.I. firms employ far fewer people than established tech companies. OpenAI and Anthropic, which are already operating globally, employ only a few thousand people. Microsoft employs more than 200,000, and Amazon employs 1.5 million. The picture that emerges isn’t of just a deepening of the current divide. The A.I. story is one of more extreme concentration of wealth — at most likely not more than 3 percent of households, the very few who hold ownership in these A.I. companies or in the mostly private firms financing them.
And the inequality just keeps trickling outward:
Well-meaning policymakers often turn to federal spending to prop up our labor markets or address the affordability crisis. But they don’t factor in the tremendous debt load our government is currently servicing nor the negative impact A.I. is poised to have on the government’s coffers.
Because investment income is taxed at lower rates than wages — and because the wealthiest often find ways to defer or avoid those taxes altogether — A.I. will significantly shrink the tax base. Economists estimate that as $1 of value creation shifts from workers to owners, total tax revenue falls on the order of 10 to 15 cents. You don’t need to squint to see the resulting cuts to safety net programs like work-force training and Head Start that low- and middle-income families rely on — cuts that will, in turn, also worsen inequality.
What to do? How about public equity in AI?
Another idea, so far still confined to think tank circles, proposes innovative tax structures to create public equity stakes in large A.I. firms; these stakes could then fund a better safety net or simply put money in workers’ pockets. After all, the “intelligence” in A.I. was ours to begin with. One especially promising fix is to incentivize more firms to convert into worker-owned cooperatives, building on modest federal support passed in 2022. If we put more workers in charge of the firms deciding how to use A.I., the odds climb that they will figure out how to use A.I. so as to increase their own value.
All of these fixes are made harder as the wealthiest parlay their economic clout into political sway.
There's more at the link.
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