You might have read Shumer’s essay Something Big Is Happening and/or the recent Citrini Global Intelligence Crisis report – or perhaps just read about them in the press – and be wondering how they relate to the line of thought I have been developing in the two recent posts, Why Everything Actually Adds Up and Why This Does Not Stabilise.
The short answer is that they neither contradict nor dramatically extend it. They approach the same underlying tension from different angles and at different speeds.
In the first of those posts, in early January, I suggested that several developments which appear disconnected – quiet professional income erosion, muted productivity translation, rising political volatility and a growing dependence on housing wealth – form a single structural pattern. Later in the month, in the second essay, I argued that this pattern is not self-stabilising. It reflects a shift in where economic value now resides, and shifts of that sort tend to unsettle the arrangements built around the previous distribution, potentially even leading to periods of acute political rupture.
Shumer’s essay is diagnostic rather than predictive. It notes unusual labour-market signals, odd productivity dynamics and a sense that familiar macro categories are not fully capturing what is happening. The tone is cautious, but the intuition is similar: the post-pandemic economy does not look like a standard cyclical adjustment. Something more structural may be under way.
The Citrini report, by contrast, is explicitly a scenario. It imagines what might happen if AI-driven compression of white-collar income becomes large enough to weaken discretionary demand, strain private credit and eventually unsettle housing and public finances. It is dramatic in form, but it rests on a recognisable mechanism: if cognitive work loses scarcity, bargaining power shifts; if bargaining power shifts, income expectations change; and if income expectations change, systems built on those expectations must adjust.
On that mechanism, there is little disagreement.
Where differences arise is in timing and visibility. The Citrini scenario assumes a relatively sharp recognition event – visible unemployment, falling asset prices and balance-sheet stress. My emphasis has been earlier in the chain. Income compression can occur without mass layoffs. Value can erode before productivity statistics move. Housing can function for a time as a buffer, allowing past asset gains to compensate for thinning professional income. From the outside, the system can appear stable even as its internal logic shifts.
Indeed, my emphasis has been closer to a punctuated equilibrium, in which long periods of apparent continuity give way to relatively rapid adjustment.
Perhaps the most notable development is not any specific forecast, but the widening of the conversation. When observers as different in tone as Shumer and Citrini begin circling related questions – even from opposite ends of the intensity spectrum – it suggests that the underlying tension is no longer confined to isolated professions or niche commentary. Increasingly, people are asking how a system organised around scarce human cognition stabilises when cognition becomes more abundant.
Nobody knows the timeline. Economic systems contain buffers; policy responses can delay or redirect adjustment; technological adoption is rarely linear. But the direction of travel seems clearer than the schedule. If intelligence ceases to command the premium it once did, labour markets, housing markets, credit structures and expectations of intergenerational continuity cannot remain unchanged.
If there is any reassurance to be taken from the recent flurry of essays and reports, it is not that crisis is imminent, but that the question is now being asked more openly. The issue is no longer whether something is shifting, but how large the shift will be, how quickly it will occur and how it will be absorbed.