The Distribution Question

Markets produce technological innovation. Markets do not, on their own, distribute the gains from that innovation in ways that serve the common good. The distribution is always the product of rules—rules about property, labor, competition, taxation—and the rules are written by actors with power. In every technological transition Reich has examined, the initial distribution favors the actors who control the new technology and the capital that finances it. Broader distribution occurs only when political institutions intervene to redirect gains toward the workers and communities who bear the costs of the transition. The AI transition is following this pattern with exceptional clarity: a handful of companies own the most powerful AI systems, capture the revenue those systems generate, and use their wealth to influence the rules governing AI deployment. The symbolic analysts who are displaced, the junior workers whose entry-level positions contract, the communities whose economic base erodes—these actors bear costs they did not choose and cannot avoid. The distribution question is not whether AI creates