This is more of a thought experiment than anything, but I think people seriously underestimate how fast things unravel once you start gutting white collar jobs at scale. “Just retrain lol” White collar jobs are gone. Just go into trades or healthcare, right? Except these people have mortgages, car payments, kids. How are you going back to school with zero income and bills that don’t pause? And who’s funding retraining at scale when the government just lost a massive chunk of its tax base? The retraining bottleneck Even if everyone pivots to trades or healthcare, you just flooded those markets with millions of applicants. Wages crater because supply massively outpaces demand. The fallback careers become just as brutal to break into. “Just do DoorDash” Same problem. Former accountants and project managers are now fighting over delivery routes. The gig economy was never designed to BE the economy. Business owners aren’t safe either Restaurants, hotels, small businesses all survive on middle class spending. These places run on razor-thin margins already. When your customer base can’t afford to eat out or travel, those businesses fold. Tourism-dependent cities implode. The housing market Millions default on mortgages simultaneously. Housing prices collapse. Banks sit on mountains of bad debt. It’s 2008 but worse because it’s not just subprime borrowers, it’s the entire professional class. Tax revenue disappears White collar workers are a huge source of income tax. Property taxes tank. Sales tax drops. The government has less money for everything right when demand for services is skyrocketing. The consumer spending death spiral ~70% of the economy is consumer spending. The middle class drives that. When they stop spending, companies see lower revenue, more layoffs, less spending. It’s a feedback loop that drags down even industries that weren’t directly affected. “UBI will fix it” Maybe. But $1-2k/month doesn’t cover a mortgage, insurance, and groceries in most places. UBI might prevent starvation but not a massive quality of life downgrade for hundreds of millions of people. And that kind of widespread downward mobility breeds serious political instability. At what point does it break? The Great Depression peaked around 25% unemployment and nearly broke the system. That was cyclical. This would be structural and permanent. I’d guess 15-20% displacement in a short timeframe starts the dominoes. Past 30%, it’s uncharted territory. TL;DR: The middle class isn’t just a demographic. It’s the load-bearing wall of the entire economy. You can’t pull it out and expect the roof to stay up. submitted by /u/Healthy_Cup_7711
Originally posted by u/Healthy_Cup_7711 on r/ArtificialInteligence