How will AI shape the distribution of prosperity?
AI could raise wages across the economy and rebuild the middle class — or concentrate enormous gains among a few firms, asset owners, and top earners. Which way it goes depends on a small set of economic mechanisms. This site turns each mechanism into an interactive general-equilibrium model you can explore under your own assumptions, or under scenarios distilled from what leading economists, technologists, and forecasters actually predict.
Direct effects on production
What AI does to tasks and workers. Depends on AI's capabilities and how firms and workers adopt it.
Automation
AI performs tasks in place of workers. Displaced labor competes for the remaining work; gains flow to capital.
Augmentation & productivity gains
AI makes workers more productive at what they already do — unevenly across occupations. Explored in the Expertise model.
New-task creation
AI spawns tasks and occupations that didn't exist. Who performs them determines who gains.
Entry barriers & expertise
AI compresses the training needed to do expert work, letting more workers enter high-paid occupations and eroding expertise rents.
Capital deepening
Massive AI investment raises the capital stock workers use — lifting productivity but also the capital share.
Who captures the productivity gains
Gains are split among AI suppliers, adopting firms, workers, and consumers — via profits, wages, and prices. Depends on competition along the AI supply chain, firms' market power, and workers' bargaining power.
Market power of AI suppliers
Concentration and markups in the market for frontier models decide how much of the surplus stays with the providers.
Firm markups, wages & prices
Do adopting firms pass gains to consumers through prices, to workers through wages, or keep them as profits?
General-equilibrium demand effects
The beneficiaries spend and save their gains, reshaping demand for goods, services — and the workers who produce them.
Demand structure & GPT incidence
Cheaper AI shifts spending across occupations' outputs: elastic vs. saturated demand, Engel forces, and worker mobility decide who gains. Explored in the Demand Structure model.