Recent elections produced similar results in very dissimilar places. Commentators came up immediately with a word to summarize what lay behind this apparent like-mindedness among the voters of Mississippi, Utah, and New York City. The word is “affordability.” It was popularized in the first place by Zohran Mamdani in his successful campaign to be mayor of New York City. In his use of it, the word refers to the fact that the health of a city depends on the ability of its population to achieve basic stability in the essentials of their lives, to earn enough relative to the cost of living to work and raise families under less than harrowing conditions. Mamdani has proposed modest reforms—free buses, free childcare for children aged six weeks to five years, some city-owned grocery stores to act as a check on food prices—that are well designed to have significant benefits for a great part of the population. I do not intend any criticism of these policies in themselves when I say that, in shifting expenses from individuals to the public, they spare many companies and corporations from the pressure to raise wages and salaries. His plan is actually a very good deal for employers. This is not a reason to oppose it, since it would be an improvement on the present state of things. But “affordability” achieved by these means is a superficial solution to a much deeper problem.

Over recent decades the interests of big money have diverged sharply from those of the general population. The trillions that sustain the stock market now are a wager on the success of artificial intelligence, and also a prop, a signifier of its inevitability as a controlling force in the emerging economy. Its promises are grandiose and vague, a consequence of the ubiquity proposed for it. AI will enhance the efficiency of all it touches, we are told. More precisely, it will displace workers. Everyone is a worker when employment is not assured for even those who are most highly skilled. This is not a novel situation, though it is more extreme than it has been since the depths of the Industrial Revolution. Once again a worker is seen as primarily an expense, a drag on profitability. She might have been seen as an asset, secondarily, until her job was de-skilled and made suitable to being done by cheaper labor. But AI will be skilled on arrival, and it will clear the factory floor, the warehouse, the classroom. It will supersede those pretenders at making literature and art, or so we are told. It will plan Martian colonies and wage war.

Whether or not these dire promises can be kept, there is one thing missing, a crucial presence in the economy as we have known it. In this vision of the future, there seems to be no consumer. In other words, there is no plan to compensate people in general for the many kinds of loss they will suffer because a technology was designed and deployed to make them redundant. AI is supposed to create great wealth, but what claim will people in general have on it? Their only part in it all will have been to get out of the way. If we imagine that the problem will be addressed, what redress will be offered but life on the dole? AI will have mowed the lawn and washed the dishes, assuming that some remnant of ordinary life persists. This seems optimistic.

The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote a book titled The Road to Serfdom (1944)—that road being socialism, of course. The book had a considerable vogue on the American right quite recently. What our so-called conservatives claim to fear and abhor is exactly what they are in fact visiting on the rest of us. Mamdani will be called a communist because he wants free city buses. The little claque of geniuses, our technocrats, will provide for the unemployed masses as benignly as suits their temperaments and their ideologies, for as long as they prosper. Surely this is serfdom. Or it might be an extreme form of socialism, though historically socialism at least claims loyalty to the well-being of a people. This concentration of power and wealth makes no such claim.

In America innovation has enhanced living standards so reliably that almost anything technological is given the benefit of the doubt. Electric lighting, the radio, the telephone, television, and computers all swept the country on the strength of a vast domestic market. The automobile and air travel have been transformative because they are very broadly accessible to consumers. Labor-saving appliances—washers, dryers, refrigerators—are typical in modern households. Granting that these things are now often imported, the economy still rests largely on the ability of a great part of the American public to buy or consume them. Economies of scale, and the efficiencies these products have introduced into ordinary life, made them both affordable and necessary.

American investment began to seek out places in the larger world where labor and production costs were cheap because of low wages and low expectations and an absence of environmental regulations. Where conditions leveled up, some of these regions became markets that could compete in importance with the American market, and our high standard of living became a disadvantage, a cost. So we were deindustrialized. We used to speak of our rising standard of living as an achievement. Now the question is how, or if, this standard is even to be maintained. The issue called “affordability” concerns the role of the consumer in the economy, “consumer” being a synonym for “wage earner,” “worker.” The consensus among the great public is that they are losing more than the overplus that allowed for discretionary spending and are struggling to sustain what they have, and even to obtain what they need. Mamdani’s approach to the problem will be to absorb individual uncertainty and expense into the collective costs of supporting the life of a city. His program will be called socialist, but it will certainly deliver workers to their jobs less worried and distracted and discontent. And it will free up discretionary spending. This should be acceptable enough to the capitalists among us.

Trump has responded to specific issues—the price of coffee or beef—by toying with his tariffs or by mentioning the possibility of sending out checks. These are and would be temporary fixes, packaged acts of “benevolence” rather than reforms that address questions of economic justice or allow state or local governments to find a stable basis for healthy future development. Mamdani’s response is to the felt life of New Yorkers, and also, as it happens, of many of us who live elsewhere. It is systemic, a broad and predictable enhancement of life. If people begin to feel otherwise, there will be democratic ways to end it. Trump treats this discontent as his emergency, a dip in the polls that might disappear when he offers a sop or a distraction.

“Affordability” is a remarkably elastic concept. It is invoked on all sides. As the word is generally understood, it has to do with cost of living on one hand and income on the other, and the inconvenience, discomfort, and insecurity that come when the two are not in balance. But, for example, cheap imports cushioned the decline in real wages as deindustrialization set in. Whether they wanted to or not, people with lower incomes were obliged by considerations of affordability to buy products that were taking the foundations out from under the industries that employed them.

Now the Trump government is liberating us from environmental standards. This might make some products cheaper if the savings are passed along to the consumer, but if they mean a rise in cancer rates, for example, the population will pay very dearly for those savings, especially if Medicare is diminished, as seems likely. All this is a part of the shrinking of the middle class and the despair of those further down the ladder. Their continuing existence, as powers in the economy or as burdens on an economy designed to shed them, is no part of the future we are being offered. Mamdani promises to shore up the life of a city in ways that will restore it to a degree of livability. In the present climate, among those who call themselves conservatives, this is an inefficiency, a nostalgia.

Here is one final example of the cheapening of labor that demonstrates the readiness of the American population to be duped. This willingness is a tendency that must be taken into account if future abuses are to be forestalled. Some of us are old enough to remember when one income was sufficient to support a household. During that time the standard of living—measured in terms of homeownership, durable goods, access to higher education, and so on—rose sharply. Then the labor force grew dramatically, and it took two incomes, in some cases three or four jobs, to support a household. There is nothing more certain than that anything is cheapened when it is in surplus or when demand for it is weak. If two incomes have the same purchasing power as one, then both earners are working for some fraction of what would have been the single earner’s pay, corrected for inflation.

Lives are harrowing and expensive because they have been entirely overtaken with work. There has been no adjustment of income to compensate for the expenses involved in childcare and transportation, among many other things. While it is true that the women’s movement, trying for equality, contributed very importantly to these changes, no kind of equity can justify absorbing a working woman’s earnings into the same level of income her household had before she made a financial contribution through her work. This by itself would have unbalanced the economy. It is a fundamental injustice affecting all those who live by their work, a cause of disappointment, weariness, bitterness. Yet their faith in the system is strong enough to let them limit their criticism to the high price of groceries rather than to the lowering valuation of their work, their health, and their time. AI fits entirely too well into this landscape. It seems perfectly designed to produce rapidly diminishing returns, at incalculable cost to society.