The bridge to wealth is being pulled up with AI

Summary

Preface I want to make three claims: two about the world we live in and one about the future ahead of us. The first is mathematical Most of the traits you were born with - intelligence, conscientiousness, height, bone density, grip strength, resting heart rate - follow a bell curve. They are Gaussian: symmetric, mean-reverting, self-averaging. The wealth you were born into is not. Wealth follows a power law. The top 1% of American households holds more than the bottom 50% combined. The mean is five times the median. These are not the same kind of object. When you multiply a bell curve by a power law to produce a life outcome, the power law dominates. Per standard deviation, parental wealth predicts a child's adult income at least as strongly as the child's own cognitive ability - and the gap widens substantially at the extremes, where the power-law tail of wealth extends far beyond anything the Gaussian bell curve of IQ can reach. One regresses. The other compounds. The second is structural The historical wire from IQ through credentials to high-paying work is being cut by artificial intelligence - and understanding why that matters requires a brief detour into how it was built. For most of human history, two inheritance systems ran in parallel and didn't communicate. Biological traits passed through chromosomes: stochastic, noisy, tending back toward the average across generations. Wealth passed through property law: wills, trusts, title deeds, institutional relationships. No regression. No noise. Just compounding. Then the French Revolution, industrial capitalism, and the credential systems of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries built a bridge between them: IQ → credentials → income → heritable wealth. For the first time at scale, cognitive ability could escape the class it was born into. Artificial intelligence is dismantling that bridge. Large language models already match median professional performance on the routine tasks that constitute a large fraction o...