The James M. and Kathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work officially launched on November 3, 2025, bringing together scholars, policymakers, and practitioners to explore important questions about economic opportunity, technology, and democracy.
Co-directed by MIT professors Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson, the new Stone Center analyzes the forces that contribute to rising income and wealth inequality through the erosion of job quality and labor market opportunities for workers without college degrees. The Center identifies innovative ways to move the economy on a more equitable trajectory.
MIT Provost Ananth Chandrakasan opened the launch event by emphasizing the urgency and importance of the center’s mission. “As artificial intelligence tools become more powerful, and as they are deployed more widely, we need to try to ensure that people from all types of backgrounds can have opportunities in the economy,” he said.
Here are some of the highlights from participants in the afternoon’s discussion on wealth inequality, libertarianism, and pro-worker AI.
Wealth inequality is driven by private business and public policy
Owen Zidar of Princeton University asserts that owners of businesses such as car dealerships, construction firms, and franchises make up a significant portion of the top 1 percent. “There’s a lot of attention paid to the CEO of every public company, there are thousands of private business owners who have at least $25 million in assets,” he said. These business owners have wielded political influence through excessive representation, lobbying, and donations.
Atif Mian of Princeton University linked high inequality to the US debt crisis, arguing that huge savings at the top are not being channeled into productive investment. Instead, falling interest rates prompt the government to run larger fiscal deficits.
To reduce wealth inequality, speakers highlighted policy proposals including rolling back the 20 percent deduction for private business owners and increasing taxes on wealth.
However, policies must be carefully designed. Antoinette Schauer of the MIT Sloan School of Management described how mortgage subsidy policies after the 2008 financial crisis actually worsened inequality by disadvantaging poor potential homeowners.
Governments should provide basic public goods and economic security
Mark Dunkelman of the Watson School of International and Public Affairs at Brown University identified excessive red tape as a major problem for modern liberal democracy. “We can’t build high-speed rail. You can’t build enough housing,” he explained. “It emboldens ordinary people who want the government to work in the populist camp. We did that to ourselves.”
Josh Cohen of Apple University/University of California at Berkeley emphasized that liberalism should provide for shared prosperity and fair opportunity, not just protect individual liberty. When people lack economic security, they may turn to leaders who abandon liberal principles altogether.
Liberal democracy needs to adapt while maintaining its core values
Helena Rosenblatt Dhar of the City University of New York Graduate Center said liberalism and democracy have not always been allies. Historically, “civil equality was very important, but not political equality,” he said. “The liberals were very wary of the public.”
Speakers emphasized that the challenge of liberalism today is to maintain its commitments to limit authoritarian power and protect fundamental freedoms while addressing its failures.
In Dunkleman’s view, doing so would mean working to “eliminate the sowing”. [of] The seeds of populism help the government appropriately balance individual rights and the will of the many.”
There is a need to regulate social media for people-centric politics
In his keynote speech at the launch, U.S. Representative Jake Auchincloss (Massachusetts 4th District) connected these perceptions of government effectiveness and public trust to the impact of technology. He stressed the need to regulate social media platforms.
He said, “In my opinion, media is upstream of culture, which is upstream of politics.” “If we want a better culture, and certainly if we want a better politics, we need a better media.”
Auchincloss proposed that regulation should include holding social media companies accountable for content and banning advertising targeting minors.
He also reiterated the urgency and importance of the Centre’s research agenda, particularly to understand whether AI will augment or replace labour.
“My bias has always been: Technology creates more jobs,” he said. “Maybe this time it’s different. Maybe I’m wrong.”
Augmentation is key for worker-supporting AI – but it may require alternative AI architectures
Daron Acemoglu, co-director of the Stone Center, argued that expanding what humans can do, rather than automating their tasks, is essential to achieving worker-supportive AI.
However, Acemoglu cautioned that this won’t happen on its own, noting that the business models of tech companies and their focus on artificial general intelligence do not align with a pro-worker approach to AI. This approach may require public investment in alternative AI architectures focused on “domain-specific, trusted knowledge”.
Ethan Mollick of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania said that AI labs are clearly trying to “replace people in everything” and are “absolutely confident that they can do that in the near future.”
Meanwhile, Molik pointed out, companies “don’t have a model for AI adoption.” “There is complete confusion.” Still, “Enough money is at stake [that] The machine keeps moving,” underscoring the urgency of intervention.
In a glimpse of what such an intervention might look like, Microsoft’s Zana Businka shared research findings that taking workers’ values and cognition into account in AI design could enable better complementarity.
“The impact of AI on human work is not destiny,” he stressed. “It’s the design.”
