The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Way forward for Work officially launched on Nov. 3, 2025, bringing together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore critical questions on economic opportunity, technology, and democracy.
Co-directed by MIT professors Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson, the brand new Stone Center analyzes the forces that contribute to growing income and wealth inequality through the erosion of job quality and labor market opportunities for staff and not using a college degree. The middle identifies revolutionary ways to maneuver the economy onto a more equitable trajectory.
MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan opened the launch event by emphasizing the urgency and importance of the middle’s mission. “As artificial intelligence tools develop into more powerful, and as they’re deployed more broadly,” he said, “we’ll have to strive to make sure that people from every kind of backgrounds can find opportunity within the economy.”
Listed here are a number of the key takeaways from participants within the afternoon’s discussions on wealth inequality, liberalism, and pro-worker AI.
Wealth inequality is driven by private business and public policy
Owen Zidar of Princeton University stressed that owners of companies like automobile dealerships, construction firms, and franchises make up a significant slice of the highest 1 percent. “For each public company CEO that gets numerous attention,” he explained, “there are a thousand private business owners who’ve a minimum of $25 million in wealth.” These business owners have outsized political influence through overrepresentation, lobbying, and donations.
Atif Mian of Princeton University connected high inequality to the U.S. debt crisis, arguing that massive savings at the highest aren’t being channeled into productive investment. As a substitute, falling rates of interest push the federal government to run increasingly large fiscal deficits.
To mitigate wealth inequality, speakers highlighted policy proposals including rolling back the 20 percent deduction for personal business owners and increasing taxes on wealth.
Nevertheless, policies should be rigorously designed. Antoinette Schoar of the MIT Sloan School of Management explained how mortgage subsidy policies after the 2008 financial crisis actually worsened inequality by disadvantaging poorer potential homeowners.
Governments must provide basic public goods and economic security
Marc Dunkelman of the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University identified excessive red tape as a key problem for contemporary liberal democracy. “We will’t construct high-speed rail. You may’t construct enough housing,” he explained. “That spurs odd individuals who want government to work into the populist camp. We did this to ourselves.”
Josh Cohen of Apple University/the University of California at Berkeley emphasized that liberalism must deliver shared prosperity and fair opportunities, not only protect individual freedoms. When people lack economic security, they might turn to leaders who abandon liberal principles altogether.
Liberal democracy must adapt while keeping its core values
Helena Rosenblatt Dhar of the City University of Latest York Graduate Center noted that liberalism and democracy haven’t at all times been allies. Historically, “civil equality was very essential, but not political equality,” she said. “Liberals were very wary of the masses.”
Speakers emphasized that liberalism’s challenge today is maintaining its commitments to limiting authoritarian power and protecting fundamental freedoms, while addressing its failures.
Doing so, in Dunkelman’s view, would mean working to “eliminate the sowing [of] the seeds of populism by making government properly balance individual rights and the need of the various.”
People-centric politics requires regulating social media
In his keynote on the launch, U.S. Representative Jake Auchincloss (Massachusetts 4th District) connected these notions of presidency effectiveness and public trust to the influence of technology. He emphasized the necessity to control social media platforms.
“In my view, media is upstream of culture, which is upstream of politics,” he said. “If we would like a greater culture, and definitely if we would like a greater politics, we’d like a greater media.”
Auchincloss proposed that regulation should include holding social media corporations responsible for content and banning targeted promoting to minors.
He also echoed the urgency and importance of the middle’s research agenda, particularly to know whether AI will augment or replace labor.
“My bias has at all times been: Technology creates more jobs,” he said. “Perhaps it’s different this time. Perhaps I’m flawed.”
Augmentation is vital to pro-worker AI — nevertheless it may require alternative AI architectures
Stone Center co-director Daron Acemoglu argued that expanding what humans can do, slightly than automating their tasks, is crucial for achieving pro-worker AI.
Nevertheless, Acemoglu cautioned that this won’t occur by itself, noting that the business models of tech corporations and their deal with artificial general intelligence aren’t aligned with a pro-worker vision for AI. This vision may require public investment in alternative AI architectures focused on “domain-specific, reliable knowledge.”
Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania noted that AI labs are explicitly attempting to “replace people at the whole lot” and are “absolutely convinced that they will do that within the very near term.”
Meanwhile, corporations have “no model for AI adoption,” Mollick explained. “There’s absolute confusion.” Even so, “there’s enough money at stake [that] the machine keeps moving forward,” underscoring the urgency of intervention.
In a glimpse of what such intervention could appear like, Zana Buçinca of Microsoft shared research findings that accounting for staff’ values and cognition in AI design can enable higher complementarity.
“The impact of AI on human work isn’t destiny,” she emphasized. “It’s design.”
