Scenario number one is a disparity in economic power, in which the folks with the data and the algorithms have—and add all of—the economic value, and the rest of the workforce adds little or none.

That scenario could create an awful social disruption.

Ultimately, our hopes for preventing a feudal future lie in a bipartisan ­alliance between the yeomanry and the serf class, one based mainly on economic goals. Neither class has much to look forward to under the neo-feudal regime.

The inability to rise, or even to maintain middle-class status, has sparked calls for a universal basic income, a policy embraced by many in the clerisy and throughout the oligarchy. A universal basic income would stand as what Karl Marx called “the proletarian alms bag,” keeping the masses from destitution without assisting them to move up, start ... See more

In the United States, long known as the land of opportunity, the chance of middle-class earners’ moving to the top rungs of the earnings ladder has dropped by approximately 20 percent since the early 1980s

No such broad conflict exists among today’s nobility. They are unified in their progressive outlook on all things social and cultural

There is a twenty-first-­century clerisy, though it is rarely religious and operates in a secular consumer society. Its members aren’t priests. They are journalists, entertainers, credentialed professionals, and teachers. They provide the images, narratives, arguments, and artworks that reinforce the binding outlook, and they police dissenters as v... See more

America increasingly resembles “feudalism with better marketing.”

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