CONCEPT
The Missing Builders
Milanovic's identification of the political agency gap — the populations in the AI valley who have not yet recognized their shared distributional condition, and whose absence from political mobilization is the binding constraint on institutional construction.
The history of distributional justice is not a history of analysts publishing correct diagnoses and governments implementing rational responses. It is a history of affected populations organizing, fighting, and building the political coalitions that forced institutional change. The AI transition has produced abundant diagnosis and an almost complete absence of political mobilization around distributional outcomes. The analytical framework exists. The distributional dynamics are visible. The institutional prescriptions are known. What is missing is the political agency that translates analysis into architecture — the builders of the distributional dams. The missing builders are the populations in the AI elephant's valley: the professional middle class whose premiums are compressing, who have not yet recognized their shared condition as a structural feature rather than a personal failure.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Every previous distributional crisis produced its builders through a specific mechanism: the formation of collective identity among populations bearing the costs. The industrial revolution