Rules Can Be Changed

In the AI Story

Reich developed this argument across decades of observing how economic rules are written and rewritten. His work on antitrust, labor law, tax policy, and corporate governance all returns to the same fundamental insight: the economy is not a natural system. It is a designed system. The design is expressed in rules, and the rules can be redesigned when the political will to redesign them exists. The knowledge economy's rules—about intellectual property, about labor markets, about educational credentialing—were written to serve the symbolic analysts who staffed the institutions that wrote them. The AI economy's rules are being written by a different set of actors: the technology companies that build AI systems, the venture capitalists that fund them, and the lobbyists who represent their interests in Washington.

The passivity of the symbolic analyst class is a product of their success. The knowledge economy worked well enough for symbolic analysts that they had no reason to question its rules. When the rules serve your interests, questioning them feels like undermining your own position. The AI transition changes this calculus by undermining the position regardless of whether it is questioned. The symbolic analysts who remain passive will find that the rules governing their displacement are written without their input—and that the rules reflect the interests of the actors who control AI platforms rather than the interests of the workers whose labor is being displaced.

Engagement requires overcoming the meritocratic ideology that has shaped the professional class's self-understanding. The ideology says that success is individual and earned, that the capable rise and the incapable fall, that collective action is for those who cannot succeed individually. The ideology is a defense mechanism that the AI transition is rendering obsolete. When the disruption is structural—when it affects an entire class simultaneously—individual adaptation is insufficient, and collective action becomes the only response capable of addressing the structural causes.

Origin

The phrase 'rules can be changed' recurs across Reich's work. It appears in Saving Capitalism as the organizing principle of the argument against market fatalism. It appears in The System as the response to resignation. It appears in this volume's epilogue as the sentence Segal identifies as the one he wants readers to carry forward. The phrase is simple because the principle is simple: political will, not economic law, determines the rules governing markets.

Key Ideas

Markets are rule-governed systems, not natural phenomena. Every market outcome reflects the rules under which the market operates—and the rules are human artifacts subject to revision.

Rules reflect the interests of those who write them. The actors with the most power—currently AI platform companies—shape the rules to serve their interests unless other actors mobilize to contest them.

Passivity guarantees unfavorable rules. The symbolic analysts who disengage from rule-writing leave the process to actors whose interests diverge from theirs and from the public good.

Collective action is the mechanism of change. Individual adaptation addresses individual circumstances; rule-writing requires the organized expression of collective interests through political institutions.

Political will is not a given but a construction. It must be built through organizing, advocacy, and the recognition that the meritocratic ideology is an obstacle to the collective action the moment requires.

Debates & Critiques

Market advocates argue that rule-rewriting reduces efficiency, stifles innovation, and produces unintended consequences worse than the problems it addresses. Reich's intellectual allies argue that the alternative—unregulated AI deployment—produces concentrated wealth, mass displacement, and political instability that markets cannot address. The empirical question is whether previous social contracts reduced innovation or channeled it toward broadly beneficial ends.