It’s easy to blame shortsighted politicians and industries over the last few decades, and that’s not wrong. But blame is the least useful part of this conversation. The more important questions are: why does a robust middle class actually matter, and what steps can we take to avoid losing ours?

Why the Middle Class Matters

The United States has always drawn its economic strength from having a large, stable middle class. It’s something that we Americans have been sentimental about and protective of for generations.

A strong middle class drives consumer demand. It means the majority of citizens have disposable income, which creates stable market conditions and lets local businesses form, compete, and hire. Industries that quietly starve the middle class in pursuit of short-term margins are, over the long run, undermining their own customer base at the expense of the immediate fiscal quarter’s numbers.

In addition to the economic argument, there’s a second, just as important factor in the fight for the middle class: a good democracy depends on a stable middle class as well. A broad, economically secure middle class supports stable civic institutions and forms a durable voting bloc. That makes a shrinking middle class a threat to both a stable economy, as well as a stable democracy.

This isn’t a New Trend

For the better part of three decades, think tanks and economists have been publishing some version of the same finding: middle-class incomes have stagnated while incomes at the very top have risen dramatically. From the 1980’s until the present day the refrain has been sung repeatedly. This isn’t a fringe take. It’s one of the most well-documented trends in modern American economics.

Even Ignoring Ethics, This Is Just Bad Math

Arguments about human cost almost never land well with industry, certainly not with 21st century Private Equity. Human factors can sometimes sway politicians, but only insofar as they believe they will affect their chances of reelection.

This may be a cynical take, but if these arguments had any sway, they would have worked already. I promise you there is nobody in a boardroom somewhere who is blissfully unaware of the human cost of layoffs and stagnating wages and just needs an Ebenezer Scrooge moment.

So, the question then becomes one of aligning incentives.

When wealth is steadily drained from the bottom 90% of earners, the “growth” left at the top is mostly the same money circulating among the same small group of people. That’s not an expanding economy; it’s a shrinking pool of actual customers. Once you squeeze the bottom for all it’s worth and the majority of the population is operating at subsistence levels, you are left with a population that cannot buy your products even if they wanted to.

If the goal is to concentrate all wealth at the top and reduce everyone else to subsistence, this strategy is working extremely well. If the goal is long-term economic growth, it’s failing badly. You simply can’t grow an economy by slowly eliminating the customers who power it.

Walgreens: A Case Study in Short-Term Thinking

Take Walgreens after its private equity acquisition. The playbook was familiar: cut holiday hours, cut overtime pay, reduce benefits, and close any store that didn’t hit an aggressive profitability threshold. The result was hundreds of jobs lost and long-term growth traded away for immediate extraction.

The math here isn’t complicated. Walgreens may not have been profitable at the time of purchase, but the private equity firm could have made more money over a longer horizon with proper investment in the company: prioritizing hiring and retaining quality staff, raising wages and benefits, and building stores that run well because people want to work there and stay. That version of Walgreens likely earns billions more over the following decade.

Instead, a handful of people made a couple of billion dollars in the short term, and a lot of workers lost their jobs and a big chunk of their financial future.

This is ultimately the private equity playbook: squeeze every bit of short-term profitability out of whatever it is they purchase, at the expense of everything else.

Reframe the Problem to Change the Outcome

It’s tempting to call this behavior callous, or even evil. Maybe it is. But if the goal is to actually change how decisions like this get made, that framing won’t get you very far with the people who need to hear it.

The more useful frame: this is a bad investment.

The goal is to consistently show that better wages and better benefits are a net long-term financial positive. Not from a moralizing standpoint, the people who need their minds changed operate solely off of spreadsheets and formulas, but from a return-on-investment standpoint. That argument has a much better shot at being adopted by the people currently making the opposite bet.

The challenge is to align financial incentives with people who are very much focused on short-term gain above all else. If we can prove that nurturing the seed corn rather than eating it can result in larger financial rewards in the long run, we may have a shot at retaining the middle class.

Next: what actually rebuilds a middle class, and why reshoring mid-skill industry back to American soil is a bigger part of the answer than most people give it credit for.

Artificial intelligence is, indisputably, a revolutionary technology. Like the internet in the 1990s and early 2000s, the way it stands to change how we live our daily lives will likely be just as profound. And just like with the advent of the internet, there are a host of problems we don’t yet fully understand that will present themselves over the next couple of decades.

The internet allowed us to access all of the world’s information with the click of a button and it has revolutionized how we approach the world. We are a more connected world, a more informed world, and, despite what a lot of people will try to tell you, a more intelligent world. The internet has been a net positive for humanity. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect. That doesn’t mean there aren’t problems, or risks we still need to learn how to mitigate. But on balance, it has been a net positive.

I think that in the long run, artificial intelligence will be too. Just like with the internet, that doesn’t mean there aren’t pitfalls we need to address, the way we did in the early days of the internet.

Two issues in particular are worth addressing. Neither is directly a result of artificial intelligence, but both are being amplified by it: learned helplessness and cognitive surrender.

Learned Helplessness, Amplified

Learned helplessness predates artificial intelligence by a significant margin, and it’s certainly not a 21st-century problem. But it has been amplified by the technology and easy access to information, and easy access to resources generally, that define this century.

When we’re used to having most, if not all, of our problems solved quickly and easily, we inherently become less gritty as people. Less willing to work for things. More likely to give up when things don’t work out immediately. That’s not a new impulse; human nature has been around as long as humans have. But when everything is immediately available and immediately answered, it’s easy to forget what it actually means to work for something.

There’s a second factor at play too: an incredibly complex world and an overabundance of information tend to be paralyzing. And plenty of industries have built entire business models on keeping you in that state.

Take medical insurance. Navigating the system around a routine procedure; figuring out what’s covered, what your actual out-of-pocket cost will be, which codes and providers are “in-network,” why a claim was denied and how to appeal it, is an exercise specifically engineered to exhaust you into giving up. It’s not an accident that the process is confusing, it’s actually the point. A system that’s genuinely difficult to navigate produces the same outcome as one that’s designed to be difficult to navigate: people stop fighting and just pay or just accept the denial. Multiply that dynamic across politics, finance, and plenty of other industries, and you get a steady, low-grade message, sometimes directly stated, sometime not, that you don’t really have agency here. Your voice doesn’t matter. Your effort doesn’t matter. Just accept it.

The AI Solution?

Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, that helplessness finally has a solution. Or does it?

If you’re feeling helpless, and you suddenly have access to the most intelligent machine ever created, the choice seems obvious: just use AI. Any time you hit a problem you’re not sure how to process, regardless of whether it’s something AI is actually designed, or even capable of, helping with, the reflex becomes to hand it over.

AI can absolutely be an antidote to helplessness. Or it can become the mechanism of surrender. Which one it is comes down almost entirely to how it’s used.

If you get in the habit of reaching for AI any time a situation calls for critical thinking, you get used to outsourcing your critical thinking. You get used to outsourcing your judgment. And there’s a massive difference between those two things:

• Offloading execution: drafting text, assisting research, handling the busy work

• Outsourcing thinking: letting the tool make the judgment call itself

How are you using AI?

Artificial intelligence is inarguably one of the most useful tools humanity has ever created, potentially the most useful. We probably won’t know for certain for several decades. But like any tool, a large part of its value comes down to how it’s applied.

So, the next time you reach for AI, ask yourself: Am I offloading tedious work that AI has genuinely made easier? Or am I outsourcing my critical thinking; my brainpower itself?

The first is using a tool the way it’s meant to be used. It’s the same instinct that has set humanity apart from every other species on the planet: build tools that extend our capability. The second is cognitive surrender, letting your brainpower be quietly supplanted by something that doesn’t actually think.

Use AI to do your busy work. Just don’t let it do your thinking.