Permanent Underclass in the Era of Abundance

The year is 2050.

Everything required to live what would have counted as a solid middle-class life in the US in 2026 is now astonishingly cheap. Healthcare is cheap. Education is cheap. Transportation is cheap. Food is cheap. A thousand dollars a month from the government is enough to cover a decent life.

At first, this feels like victory.

No more grinding through jobs you hate just to keep the lights on. No more structuring your life around a manager, a commute, a shift, a spreadsheet, or a clock. People in 2026 used to spend the brightest hours of the day indoors, renting out the most prime time of their lives in exchange for rent money. Looking back, this seems like servitude.

For decades, people imagined that freedom from labor would feel like liberation. For some, it did. For many others, it felt like drift. When the demands of work disappeared, so did one of the few remaining structures that gave people discipline, identity, and a sense of dignity. It turned out that the crisis after AGI was not only economic. It was existential.

AI started by automating verifiable work done in front of a computer. It started with Programming. Then it moved outward. Law, tax, diagnosis, tutoring, design, therapy, customer support, logistics, finance. One by one, entire categories of skilled labor became cheaper, faster, and more abundant. The things that became cheap were the things that could be copied. Intelligence became cheap. Instruction became cheap. Content became cheap. Basic services became cheap.

But the things that mattered most were never the easiest things to copy.

There are still only so many brownstones in Brooklyn. Still only so many homes overlooking the water in Miami, the hills in Los Angeles, the parks in London, and the best streets in Tokyo. Still only so many seats in the elite schools that shape the ruling class. Still only so much public trust, so much status, so much attention. Still only so many people whose endorsement can move markets, whose names open doors, whose ownership compound while they sleep.

The old economy was organized around labor. The new one, increasingly, is organized around scarcity.

That is where the promise of abundance starts to curdle.

Because a society can make basic life cheap without making power accessible. It can give everyone food, medicine, tutoring, entertainment, and still reserve the truly scarce things for those who already own them. In fact, the cheaper the basics become, the more fiercely people compete for what remains exclusive.

This is the distinction that matters: abundant goods and positional goods.

Abundant goods are the things AI helps flood the world with: food, basic healthcare, standard education, commodity entertainment, generic digital labor. Positional goods are the things whose value comes precisely from the fact that not everyone can have them: elite neighborhoods, elite schools, prestige networks, attention, cultural influence, political access, ownership stakes, trusted brands.

The tragedy of the AI age may be that it solves the first category spectacularly while intensifying the second.

That is what I mean by a permanent underclass. Not a class condemned to hunger, but a class locked out of ownership. A class that can live, but not rise. A class that can consume abundance, but cannot accumulate the scarce assets that shape the future. Their lives may be comfortable. Their children may be educated. But the ladder upward grows thinner every year, because the assets that matter most inflate faster than ordinary people can ever catch them.

You do not starve in this world. You just stop believing you will ever own a meaningful piece of it.

Will the socio-economic ladder cease to exist?