Who is the economy for? The oldest question, asked again
It’s been there all along. We’ve mostly been allowed to ignore it. That’s changing.
The question is older than economics. Older than the nation state. Who is the system for. Who benefits. Who pays. Who gets left behind. Every stable period in human history is built on an answer to that question. Every period of upheaval is built on the answer changing.
We’ve mostly been allowed to ignore it in the UK for the past 60 years. The post-war settlement, the one built by frightened people in the aftermath of the Depression and a world war, answered the question in a way that held. The economy was, roughly, for working people. Not perfectly. The distribution was never equal. But the productivity gains from each generation flowed broadly enough to broadly enough people that the political consensus held. You worked. You expected to earn more than your parents. Your children would earn more than you. The system wasn’t perfect but it moved in the right direction often enough to feel like progress.
That arrangement is now under stress. The data is clear on this. Real wages for median-income workers in the UK have been flat since 2008. Younger cohorts expect to earn less, in real terms, than their parents did at the same life stage. Home ownership is generationally stratified: people who bought before 2008 accumulated wealth; people who haven’t bought by 2026 mostly can’t. Pension income sources have shifted from defined benefit schemes that the employer funded to defined contribution schemes where the worker bears the risk. The intergenerational compact, the implicit bargain that each generation would be better off than the last, is visibly breaking down.
AI displacement doesn’t create this problem. It accelerates it and concentrates it. When productivity gains flow entirely to capital owners and there’s no political mechanism to redirect them, the question that was background noise becomes foreground text. What is the economy actually for. Not what we say it’s for. What is it actually for, given the way it distributes outcomes and concentrates gains.
The question is political economy, not tech. This is crucial and worth dwelling on because the tech industry has a vested interest in framing labour displacement as a technical problem with technical solutions. Retraining. Upskilling. New job categories. The narrative holds together until you look at the precedent. The Industrial Revolution created enormous new job categories. It took 60 years for wages for ordinary people to stop declining. The transitions that worked, the ones that avoided social collapse, were always political interventions: unions, regulations, tax structures, welfare systems. The countries that managed transitions well, Denmark, South Korea, post-war Germany, were the ones where political institutions did something deliberate.
The countries where political institutions did nothing, or where the political consensus was that “this is how markets work and we don’t interfere,” produced the 1930s. Concentrated wealth. Rising authoritarianism. Collapsed democracies. A 70-year cold war that could have become a hot one at any moment.
That’s not destiny. It’s precedent. And the reason it matters is that we’re entering a period where that question, who is the economy for, has to be answered again. Not because we’re virtuous. Because the previous answer is visibly breaking down and the gap between “the economy is for everyone” and “the economy is increasingly for capital owners” is becoming politically dangerous.
The timing is not flexible. The window for addressing this through policy is roughly now through 2032. After that, the structure calcifies. Capital gains compound. Wealth concentration becomes structural rather than reversible. The people who miss the transition period face either multi-decade waits for generational turnover to change the structure, or politically unstable outcomes as the excluded majority challenges the arrangement.
In the next five years, societies around the world will make decisions about AI deployment, taxation of productivity gains, platform regulation, the status of gig workers, the funding of retraining. Those decisions will be made quietly, in technocratic conversations and corporate boardrooms and parliamentary committees where attendance is sparse. They won’t feel momentous at the time. But they will determine whether the next 50 years look like a managed adjustment or a neo-feudal extraction.
The uncomfortable truth is that nobody is asking this question at scale. The tech industry has no incentive to ask it. The financial sector has no incentive to ask it. The political class is fragmented and lacking the consensus to ask it. Which means it will be answered by default, which is the same as being answered badly.
Women in Swindon running repair workshops out of converted office blocks are asking it, implicitly, by building something other than platform work. Former accountants teaching financial literacy in Tower Hamlets are asking it. 24-year-olds in Leeds building working lives from multiple income streams and demonstrated skills are asking it. They’re not waiting for permission. They’re just building the world they’re willing to live in.
That’s how institutional change always starts. Not with a master plan. Not with a political mandate. With people deciding quietly that the current answer to “who is the economy for” is not acceptable and building something different.
The question is old. The answer changes. The window for influencing that change is open now. In a few years, it closes. And then the question gets answered without you.