In 1963, the Studebaker car company closed its plant in South Bend, Indiana. Its pension fund was so far short of its obligations that the wind-down split workers in three groups: those at retirement age got their full pensions, a larger group got a lump sum worth roughly 15% of what they were promised, and about 2,900 workers got nothing. Studebaker became the case reformers pointed to for the next decade. Senator Jacob Javits of New York carried a bill to protect private pe

What Have We Learned? The Bargain That Built the Middle Class The American middle class was built through a series of negotiated agreements about what employers owed workers, what workers owed firms, and which responsibilities belonged to the government instead of business. Many of those agreements were designed for an industrial economy dominated by large, stable employers. Today, AI, platform work, and the fragmentation of employment are testing whether that model can still

Last month, we addressed the New Deal. This legislature is often remembered as the moment America decided workers deserved protection, but hidden inside the architecture Frances Perkins helped build was a devastating compromise. This was a trap door through which millions of workers fell through. Agricultural and domestic, disproportionately Black and immigrant workers, were excluded from the very laws meant to protect them. Nearly one hundred years later, the consequences of

Last year we wrote that reducing immigration as called for by Project 2025 and supported by the Trump Administration would weaken the economy by shrinking consumer demand and reducing tax revenue. At the time, it felt like a minority position. The latest estimates about migration and labor supply from the U.S. Census Bureau are alarming. Net international migration has collapsed from 2.7 million people in 2024 to 1.3 million in 2025, a 54% plunge in a single year. The project

One Person, One List, One Rewrite Last month we covered the bloodiest era in American labor history. Haymarket. Homestead. Pullman. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire. Workers died in the streets, in factories, on railroad tracks. Each tragedy produced outrage. Some produced commissions. A few produced laws. But one produced a notable woman: Frances Perkins. Perkins produced the architecture of the modern employer-employee compact in America. Social Security, the minimum wage, the

American labor history from 1886 to 1914 has many horrific events: A bomb explodes in a Chicago square. Private detectives open fire on striking steelworkers. Federal troops crush a railroad walkout. Women and children burn alive in a factory. A tent colony of miners gets attacked by the National Guard. These events led to labor reforms that include: The eight-hour workday The workweek defined as spanning Monday to Friday Child labor laws The right to organize as a collectiv

The First Gig Workers Lowell, Massachusetts. 1837. A 31-year-old woman from New Hampshire, Sarah Bagley arrives to work as a weaver. The job promises education, independence, a chance to send money home. The mill owners market it as a step up from farm life. It was pretty common at that time for women to work, especially if they were unmarried or widowed. Most working conditions were physically demanding, time intensive and insecure - working long hours, in unsafe environment

Two Birthdays, One Question America turns 250 this year. At its birth, the nation declared "all men are created equal" while one-fifth of its population was enslaved . The nation promised "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" while enforcing indentured servitude contracts. The nation protected property rights extensively and labor rights not at all. These contradictions have sparked questions for two-and-a-half centuries We're also celebrating a birthday this year: In

Another year, another round of predictions. Some of what we predicted in late 2024 came to pass. Some took unexpected turns. A few made us look prescient. Others? Let's just say reality had other plans. We've spent 2025 chronicling how humanity navigated previous technological disruptions, from Mesopotamian clay tablets to Ford's assembly lines . The patterns are eerily consistent: disruption, adaptation, new jobs, eventual integration. But as we move into territory wher

ChatGPT generated You’re a surgeon. Your client arrives at your cosmetic surgery practice with a phone full of AI-generated images showing their "perfect self." Twenty variations of their face, each optimized by algorithms trained on millions of beauty standards. Your job? Execute that AI-generated vision with surgical precision, literally. You're no longer an artist. You're a contractor following someone else's blueprints. Except the "someone else" isn't human. Welcome to th

ChatGPT generated Your job interview goes perfectly. The candidate answers every question with poise, demonstrates deep technical...

ChatGPT generated For the past eight months we've been excavating historical transformations triggered by general purpose technologies...

It's 2025. Private companies are launching satellites. Nuclear power is having a comeback as AI's electricity appetite grows. Meanwhile,...

The lights flicker. The Wi-Fi drops. Your laptop battery dies. Suddenly, life grinds to a halt. It's a reminder of how dependent we are...

Cars that drive themselves. Algorithms that write passable fiction. There is no domain or sector that AI doesn’t disrupt. Robots taking...

Viral content. Misinformation. Information bubbles. Ecochambers. Democratized knowledge. Speech suppression. Nothing new. Isn’t it...

Last news cycle? It’s now old news! Today information is instantly available worldwide. It creates unstoppable news cycles, stock trades,...

Long before the AI language models got good at writing, or rather generating text, humanity went through its first information...

Welcome to 2025! What technological advancements will we see this year? Every day brings news of breakthroughs in AI, quantum computing,...

2025 is bound to shock us and leave us breathless with headlines about AI replacing jobs and transforming society (along with other...