You’ve heard the story. GDP is up. Markets are climbing. Productivity numbers look great on paper.
So why does everything feel so damn hard?
Talk to almost anyone—parents juggling impossible schedules, young people wondering if they’ll ever afford a home, retirees watching their savings erode, small business owners hanging on by their fingernails—and you won’t hear relief. You’ll hear anxiety. Exhaustion. A creeping sense that the game is rigged in ways they can’t quite articulate.
They’re not wrong.
The Old Story Broke. We Just Didn’t Notice.
For decades, we were taught a simple equation: economic growth equals shared prosperity. When the pie gets bigger, everyone gets a bigger slice. Growth meant more jobs, rising wages, a little more breathing room each year. The gains flowed through work.
That story was always imperfect, but it contained enough truth to hold together. Until it didn’t.
Here’s what changed: A growing share of today’s economic growth comes from efficiency, automation, and scale—not from employing more people or paying them better. Companies can now increase output, profits, and market value with fewer workers and flatter payrolls. That’s great for shareholders. It’s devastating for everyone whose livelihood depends on trading their time for a paycheck.
And AI is accelerating this fracture at a pace we’ve never seen.
So when the headlines trumpet a “strong economy,” what they’re really measuring is the health of capital—not the health of communities, families, or human beings. Growth is flowing around people now, not through them.
We’ve Seen This Movie Before
If you’re of a certain age, this moment feels unsettlingly familiar.
Many of us grew up inside the promises of Reagan-era trickle-down economics—the seductive idea that if we trusted markets, cut taxes at the top, and got government out of the way, prosperity would eventually reach everyone. Be patient. Work hard. Your turn is coming.
What actually happened? Productivity rose, but wages flattened. Manufacturing hollowed out. Wealth began concentrating at the top at a historic pace. The gains trickled, sure—slowly, unevenly, and never enough to keep pace with the rising costs of housing, healthcare, and education.
That gap compounded over forty years into the extreme inequality we live with today.
So when people hear the same logic recycled now—trust the innovators, trust the market, prosperity is coming—their skepticism isn’t ideological. It’s lived experience. It’s memory. And it’s wisdom.
This Time, the Mechanics Are Fully Broken
What makes this moment more dangerous is that the underlying assumptions of trickle-down economics aren’t just strained anymore. They’re shattered.
AI doesn’t dilute the link between growth and jobs. It severs it.
Growth can now scale without labor at all in many sectors. AI doesn’t need healthcare. Software doesn’t need childcare. Automation doesn’t need time off. The gains concentrate where ownership already exists—among asset holders, executives, and investors—while the costs that can’t be automated (housing, care, education, health) keep climbing.
Waiting for prosperity to “trickle down” isn’t just slow in this environment. It may never happen at meaningful scale unless we deliberately choose a different path.
Economists call what we’re living through a “K-shaped economy.” One group is ascending: people with assets, people close to capital, people who benefit directly from AI and financial markets. Another group is treading water or slipping: people paid primarily for their time, renters, caregivers, young families, service workers. Both realities exist simultaneously. GDP doesn’t tell you which side of the K you’re on.
Why This Is the Worst Possible Moment to Trust Billionaires With Policy
This isn’t about demonizing individuals. It’s about being honest about incentives.
Billionaires didn’t become billionaires by optimizing for broad affordability, family time, community resilience, or human flourishing. They became billionaires by optimizing for scale, efficiency, market dominance, and return on capital. Those goals aren’t evil—but they’re not the same as building a society where ordinary people can live with dignity, raise families, and have time to be human.
And those incentives are now amplified by AI.
Expecting the same logic that concentrated wealth over the last forty years to suddenly distribute it—without intentional policy, without democratic input, without a fundamental rethinking of who the economy is supposed to serve—isn’t realism. It’s magical thinking.
In a world where growth can occur without people, people don’t automatically benefit from growth. That’s not cynicism. It’s arithmetic.
What People Are Really Asking For
When people talk about affordability, they’re not just talking about prices. They’re talking about having enough margin to breathe—time, stability, predictability, dignity. They’re asking whether growth still serves human life, or whether human life is being asked to contort itself around growth.
They sense that wages aren’t keeping up. That safety nets are fraying. That the upside is no longer broadly shared. And they’re being asked, once again, to trust that if we just give more power to those at the very top, the benefits will somehow find their way down.
They’ve heard that promise before. They know how it ends.
We Need Room to Be Human
At Better Places, we believe the point of economic progress isn’t to produce impressive numbers on a dashboard. It’s to create lives worth living.
If AI and efficiency are genuine gains—and they are—then the returns shouldn’t show up only as higher asset prices and larger fortunes at the top. They should show up as more time with our families, less stress about making rent, healthier communities, and lives that feel more livable, not more precarious.
That’s the vision behind my upcoming book, Room to Be Human—a case for reclaiming our time, our communities, and our democracy from an economic system that has forgotten what it’s supposed to be for. It’s a roadmap for what comes next, grounded in the understanding that we can’t build better places by repeating the same mistakes with more powerful tools.
People’s instincts are ahead of the policy conversation right now. They remember broken promises. They can feel that repeating them in an AI-driven economy would be catastrophic.
That instinct isn’t fear. It’s memory. And it’s wisdom.
Let’s honor it.
What You Can Do Right Now:
1. Sign up for updates about Room to Be Human and be the first to know when it launches.
2. Share this piece with someone who’s feeling the squeeze—not because they need an economics lecture, but because they deserve to know their instincts are right.
3. Join the conversation here at Better Places. We’re building a community of people who believe the economy should work for humans—not the other way around.
The next chapter isn’t written yet. Let’s make sure we’re the ones holding the pen.
Better Places 