PERSON
Robert Reich
The political economist who diagnosed how power—not just technology—determines who wins and who loses in every wave of economic disruption, and who predicted that the knowledge workers celebrated by the information age would become AI's most exposed class.
🜀obert Reich is the economist of power. Where other analysts of the AI transition ask what the technology can do, Reich asks the prior question: who owns it, who wrote the rules governing its deployment, and who captures the gains when it displaces the labor it replaces. In
The Work of Nations (1991), he sorted the American workforce into three categories—routine production workers, in-person service workers, and
symbolic analysts—and predicted that the third group, the programmers, lawyers, consultants, and designers who manipulated symbols for a living, would win the knowledge economy. For thirty years, he was right. Then
large language models learned to manipulate symbols, and the category Reich had placed at the apex of the economic hierarchy became, in his own updated taxonomy, the category most exposed to AI displacement. The inversion is the central fact of the present moment, and Reich insists it is not a natural phenomenon: markets do not automate symbolic analysis the