AI is going to make someone wildly richer. The only open question is whether it makes the rest of us safer and freer or more replaceable and more financially fragile. We take a hard look at the “productivity miracle” story and ask what happens when the gains from automation and generative AI keep flowing to the top while millions live one emergency away from losing housing, health care, and stability.
We connect that to an old prediction from Keynes: if productivity keeps climbing, ordinary people should be able to live like today’s high earners and work far fewer hours. Yet we’re still grinding through full-time weeks, and the precariat keeps growing. For us, that’s the heart of the problem: not envy, not abstract wealth inequality, but poverty as economic precarity. When the floor is missing, everything gets expensive: crime, stress, bad health outcomes, and desperate decisions that harm everyone.
Then we get practical. We walk through the “tax wealth not work” approach popularised by Gary’s Economics and break down what it could look like in real policy: a progressive wealth tax, removing the Social Security cap, taxing capital gains like income, closing loopholes like carried interest, and even charging luxury assets such as private jets and yachts like we already do with cars and property. We also tackle the usual pushback about rich people leaving and the “unrealised gains” argument.
If you’re thinking about AI governance, wealth taxes, universal healthcare, Social Security reform, and how to build a post-scarcity or post-precarity society, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who argues about AI or taxes, and leave a review with your take: what’s the first policy you’d pass to end precarity?
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Comments? Feedback? Questions? Solutions? Message us! We will do a mailbag episode.
Email: solutionsfromthemultiverse@gmail.com
Adam: @ajbraus - braus@hey.com
Scot: @scotmaupin
adambraus.com (Link to Adam's projects and books)
The Perfect Show (Scot's solo podcast)
Thanks to Jonah Burns for the SFM music.
