Circular Causation in the Classroom
The educational system is not one institution among many that the AI transition will reshape — it is the decisive institution, the one whose response to artificial intelligence will determine more than any regulatory framework or corporate governance structure whether the benefits concentrate among the already-advantaged or distribute broadly enough to justify the word "democratization." Myrdal understood this with a clarity his contemporaries in development economics often lacked: educational systems do not merely reflect inequality; they reproduce it through mechanisms of circular causation operating with the same self-reinforcing logic in classrooms as in capital markets.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism is straightforward. Communities with higher incomes generate more tax revenue, which funds better schools, which produce more educated graduates, who earn higher incomes, which generates more tax revenue. The circle runs in one direction for advantaged communities and in the opposite direction for disadvantaged ones, producing