We have to build one.
The first step is to keep today’s wealth gap from compounding without limit. Income from ownership shouldn’t operate on a more favorable tax clock than income from work once fortunes reach extraordinary levels.
The second is to broaden ownership. Some of the revenue raised from extraordinary fortunes should help ordinary Americans acquire homes, retirement assets, education and business capital.
An ownership economy needs more owners.
We should also make sure workers share the gains while employment remains central. That could include stronger wage floors, refundable tax credits, portable benefits, employee profit-sharing and shorter working hours where greater productivity makes them possible.
If AI allows us to produce the same amount with fewer hours of human labor, leisure should be part of the dividend. The only choices shouldn’t be unemployment for some people and larger fortunes for others.
And we should begin preparing now for the possibility that wages will eventually be unable to distribute enough of the country’s prosperity. That may require a guaranteed minimum income, a negative income tax, a social dividend or some approach we haven’t designed yet.
It shouldn’t replace work, Social Security or essential public services. Nor should it be presented as payment for doing nothing. It would recognize a new economic reality: If machines perform an increasing share of productive work, access to a decent life can’t remain entirely dependent on selling human labor.
We don’t need to decide the final formula today. We do need to stop pretending the old system will automatically adjust.
AI companies will naturally try to maximize profits. Investors will seek returns. Inventors and entrepreneurs should be richly rewarded for creating useful technology.
But markets don’t decide how broadly wealth should be distributed. Laws do. Tax systems do. Labor rules, property rights, educational opportunities and public investments do.
The technology may be revolutionary. The concentration of its rewards isn’t inevitable.
That is the choice before us.
We can allow the wealth AI creates to flow mainly toward the people who already own the companies, chips, data centers and financial assets. Their fortunes will grow, they will purchase still more of the productive economy, and the ownership clock will continue running in their favor.
Or we can modernize the system while there is still time. We can tax extraordinary gains more fairly, give workers a greater claim on rising productivity, broaden ownership and prepare an income floor if paid employment can no longer support enough of the population.
That isn’t socialism. It is what a durable capitalist economy has always required: enough people with enough income, security and ownership to keep the system working—and enough faith in the future to believe it still belongs to them.
By the time today’s children reach adulthood, machines may be doing work we can barely imagine. The country will almost certainly be capable of producing far more wealth than it does now.
The question won’t be whether those children have worked hard enough to deserve a decent life. The machines may already be productive enough to provide one.
The question will be who owns the machines, who receives the gains and whether everyone else has a meaningful claim on the abundance.