> we need a hyper-productive world where someone working a few hours a year generates enough wealth to secure a comfortable lifestyle up there with the best of them.

This is naive, productivity increases had decoupled from compensation a long time ago. See https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/ for example. AI certainly can create wealth, and in fact already did (hey NVDA), but somehow that did not trickle down. I think more likely than not, AI will further stratify our society.

Why then, outside of Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and the UAE (All of which are tiny countries, and at least two of them are Petrostates), does the United States have the world's highest median income with a population of over 342 million people?

The typical American is insanely wealthy by global standards.

But it's not like AI did any of that...

Right we had a functioning labor movement to thank for productivity gains being distributed to the working class. When that got undermined beginning late seventies early 80s with offshoring we see wealth just flowing to the top without significantly benefiting the working class.

Past innovation did though.

Wealth inequality is worse now than the era of robber barons & gilded age.

Who cares? If higher wealth inequality produces a higher standard of living for the majority (note, median not mean), I’m all for it. Policy should not be driven by envy.

It isn't, so now what?

You should care because people vote and the social consequences are going to be devastating.

It is easy for me to take this perspective too because I never had much student debt or children.

The median though is getting crushed if they went to college and are paying for daycare.

If you are getting crushed for going to school and having children that is a pretty clear breakdown of the social contract.

The consequences are obvious. People are going to vote in socialist policies and the whole engine is going to get thrown in reverse.

The "let them eat cake" strategy is never the smart strategy.

It is not obvious at all our system is even compatible with the internet. If the starting conditions are 1999, it would seem like the system is imploding. It is easy to pretend like everything is working out economically when we borrowed 30 trillion dollars during that time from the future.

> The median though is getting crushed if they went to college and are paying for daycare.

> If you are getting crushed for going to school and having children that is a pretty clear breakdown of the social contract.

That isn't a factor in wealth inequality. Inequality is how much money they have relative to people like Musk and Bezos - or just local business owners. The poor side of that comparison always has such little wealth/income that their circumstances don't really matter. Someone poor will be sitting in the +-$100k band and not be particularly creditworthy. When compared to a millionaire the gap is still going to be about a million dollars whether they're on the crushed or non-crushed side of the band.

Part of the reason the economic situation gets so bad is because people keep trying to shift the conversation to inequality instead of talking about what actually matters - living standards and opportunities. And convincing people to value accumulating capital, we're been playing this game for centuries, inter-generational savings could have had a real impact if people focused on being effective about it.

In the gilded age people were worth a larger fraction of the entire country’s GDP than today. Rockefeller alone was something like 2% of GDP.

The 1870-1900 period experienced the greatest expansion of U.S. industry, and the fastest rise in both U.S. wages and U.S. life expectancy, in history.

Sure, the USA is in the top five in terms of median income. They are also tied for first for having the highest cost of living.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-l...

> They are also tied for first for having the highest cost of living.

Who cares?

Absolute savings rate and net worth are what matter.

Any European will gladly live in America for US$1 million/year income even if the cost of living is US$300k/year.

Americans at every wealth level live shorter lives than e.g. Brits.

https://www.ft.com/content/653bbb26-8a22-4db3-b43d-c34a0b774...

Who the fuck do you know that makes a million dollars a year? The majority of Americans barely clear that bar over their entire career.

> Absolute savings rate and net worth are what matter.

OK, now tell me how the savings and net worth look like for your average American. I'll give you a bit of a spoiler: it's not good.

Insanely wealthy when your comparison includes tin pot dictatorships, theocracies, and ex-soviet countries that still haven't gotten their shit together. Weird how that unimaginable wealth doesn't translate into financial security, access to high quality healthcare, or the ability to own a home.

But humans aren't more productive for the most part. What had made people more productive is, for the most part, mechanization, computerization, and other tech tree improvements.

Even though everyone didn't get rich from the industrial revolution, ultimately people led easier lives, more stuff, and less work.

I read that a peasant in the middle ages typically worked less and had much more leisure than a worker in the 21st century.

Peasants in the Middle Ages did hard, agrarian labor, had poor sanitation, high child mortality, and limited horizons. While nobles had wealth and comfort, the era was generally harsh, with most lacking modern amenities and facing short, physically demanding lives.

You've read that they had more days off but that's only because they couldn't work in the winter.

Instead, they hoped the food stores would last and the kids wouldn't die so they could help work the land next year.

You can achieve medieval peasent level of life quality by not working at all these days.

When statistical artifacts are controlled for, it shows that there's been almost no gap between productivity and compensation growth:

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sources-of-real-wage-stag...

The EPI is also not a credible source, given who funds it.

> for example. AI certainly can create wealth, and in fact already did (hey NVDA), but somehow that did not trickle down.

The millions of people who use NVDA’s products do not get value from it? Isn’t it making their lives richer?

If your employer gets you a nvda card or openai subscription, it doesn't automatically mean you are getting richer, agreed?

And the richness of life it's another philosophical discussion altogether...

I don't know why you think that graph is contradicting me, if wages and productivity aren't linked having people do make-work is even more stupid! They're already doing work that they aren't even being compensated for, fighting to preserve that when the work doesn't need to be done is legitimately crazy. It'd be fighting for the right to do work that isn't being compensated for and isn't useful. One of the rare situations that is even worse than just straight paying people to not do anything. I'm seeing a scenario where we have such high individual productivity that everyone can live a very comfortable life. If in practice the way it is working is a couple of people do all the work and the benefits are divvied up among everyone else then that hardly undermines the vision.

Although if we're talking the optimum way of organising society, y'know, re-linking wages and productivity is a probably a good path. This scheme of not rewarding productive people has seen the US make a transition from growth hub of the world to being out-competed by nominal Communists. They aren't exactly distinguishing themselves with that strategy.

I’m not an expert but my understanding is a slow migration from agriculture oriented jobs to industrial to information jobs. Yes we all have more cheap junk but also economic disparity and a hollowing out of the middle class. That will get worse faster than new types of jobs can be created. Will the new jobs even replace the same levels of income? It seems impossible.

>"Protecting" people from AI doing their jobs is literally encouraging them work for no reason - it is pointless, wasteful and there are better equilibriums to aim for.

Exactly zero of the AI bros who believe they're going to push us into a workless utopia have even began to tell us about how we're all supposed to survive without work or being born obscenely rich.

You may not be aware, but today in 2025 the overwhelming majority of Americans rely on work for survival. They trade time for money, and use that to pay for things like housing or health care or food. How does one acquire these things if they cannot trade their time anymore, in a society that fully believes that even giving a child $1 for lunch money the moral equivalent to the worst atrocities and horrors of Soviet and Chinese socialism?

> We aren't going to make the next big leap in lifestyles without doing the same thing to a lot more jobs.

Which planet is going to sustain that? More productivity doesn't add any resources to sustain your lifecycle.