TL;DR
America's wealthiest people sit at the top of both the wage scale and the capital scale, and the meritocratic story that justified them is being forced open or shut by AI.
Since the 1970s America has had a kind of rich person nobody had seen before: top of the salary ladder and top of the stock-and-rent ladder at the same time. Researchers gave the type a name — rich in both ways at once.
Winning on both sides
They are about 3% of the US population. Mexico has rich people too, but there the rich do not work and the well-paid doctors and lawyers own too little to count. The two groups never overlap.
Holding both sides is a hedge: a bad year in the markets is cushioned by the salary, a lost job is cushioned by the portfolio. The old fight between capital and labour gets settled inside one household.
The cost is the door. Getting in means affording the right school. By the authors' reckoning, what an elite family spends on a child's education adds up to something like a $10 million inheritance.
Two futures for AI
If AI merely assists these people, they get safer. Their share grows from 3% toward 6% or 7%, and they pass it on. A hard-working hereditary aristocracy takes shape.
If AI simply does their work — lawyers, consultants, engineers, doctors, the jobs that pay a premium for a good mind and a good diploma — the salary leg disappears and only the assets remain. They revert to idle capitalists.
A pyramid with no middle
Either way, the claim that effort gets you up stops being believable. Society becomes a steep pyramid: a few thousand people who own the models at the top, a closed elite beneath them, a service class doing what AI cannot, and a large redundant population at the base.
The old line that a growing middle class brings stable democracy may turn out to have been a lucky period, not a rule. One thing is clear: the forty-year arrangement in which the same people held the best jobs and the most property is ending.
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