Over 70% of Americans are now living below the poverty line. MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce

Over 70% of Americans are now living below the poverty line, according to Mike Green. If you make under $140,000 a year, you're living in poverty if we measure it the same way we did in the 1960s.
byu/TonyLiberty inFluentInFinance



It’s a blog post:

https://www.yesigiveafig.com/p/part-1-my-life-is-a-lie

The synopsis is the standard was 3x the minimum food budget in the 60’s because food was about 1/3 of household spending. Now food is much less than 1/3 of household spending due to medical and housing costs rising.

The composition of household spending transformed completely. In 2024, food-at-home is no longer 33% of household spending. For most families, it’s 5 to 7 percent.

Housing now consumes 35 to 45 percent. Healthcare takes 15 to 25 percent. Childcare, for families with young children, can eat 20 to 40 percent.

If you keep Orshansky’s logic—if you maintain her principle that poverty could be defined by the inverse of food’s budget share—but update the food share to reflect today’s reality, the multiplier is no longer three.

It becomes sixteen.

Which means if you measured income inadequacy today the way Orshansky measured it in 1963, the threshold for a family of four wouldn’t be $31,200.

It would be somewhere between $130,000 and $150,000.

MIT study finds AI can already replace 11.7% of U.S. workforce

Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday released a study that found that artificial intelligence can already replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, or as much as $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.

The study was conducted using a labor simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, which was created by MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The index simulates how 151 million U.S. workers interact across the country and how they are affected by AI and corresponding policy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/26/mit-study-finds-ai-can-already-replace-11point7percent-of-us-workforce.html

h/t snakesign

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