CONCEPT
Sticky Identities
The Keynesian insight extended to the AI age: professional identity is stickier than any wage, and identity dissolution is the central psychological friction of the transition.
Keynes's theory of sticky wages began with an observation: workers resist pay cuts not because they are irrational but because a wage cut carries meaning that transcends arithmetic. Ten percent less pay is experienced as a judgment, an evaluation that violates the implicit contract between employer and employee. The AI transition has revealed a stickiness far deeper than wages — professional identity, the sense of self constructed through years of specialized practice, the answer to 'What do you do?' that locates the individual in a social world. Identity is stickier than any wage by an order of magnitude. And this stickiness is the primary friction of the AI transition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism operates through logic that economic models capture poorly but that anyone who has watched a skilled professional confront obsolescence will recognize immediately. A wage is a number; it can be adjusted, supplemented, replaced. The worker who accepts a pay cut loses income but retains identity. An identity is not