Financial Mindset

As Professor Joseph Stiglitz sees it, AI is not just another technology wave—it’s a force that can erode jobs and hard‑wire a new era of inequality. That is, unless governments and institutions deliberately push it in a different direction.  AI lets firms strip labor out of production, concentrate profits at the top, and push the risks of transition onto workers and the public—exactly the trajectory the Nobel laureate warns about in his 2024 book, the recently reissued The Road to Freedom : Economics and the Good Society. Now, the economics professor argued in a recent interview with Fortune , AI is emerging as a textbook case of how technology can turbocharge inequality. “If we don’t do anything about managing AI, there is a threat that it will lead to more inequality,” Stiglitz said. “And since inequality is such a bad, serious problem in our society, that is a great concern to me.” Stiglitz has spent his career watching capitalism fail the people it was supposed to serve. He...

Who should control AI? Are the corporations that release the powerful technology the arbiters of their fate? Or should that power be vested in the hands of the government? Palmer Luckey, the founder of defense company Anduril—which aims to modernize the U.S. military—thinks the answer is straightforward: give the power to the government. In a recent interview with the New York Post , the billionaire founder weighed in on a burgeoning debate around who gets to determine how AI is used by the government. For the billionaire, it’s up to the government, and therefore, the people, to make specific use decisions. Otherwise, tech companies could imperil democracy. “We need to stick to a position that this is in the hands of the people,” he said. “Anyone who says that a defense company should be going beyond the law, beyond what legislators and elected leaders say in terms of who they’ll work with and not, you are effectively saying you do not believe in this democratic experiment, that yo...

The United States and its allies in the Middle East are seeking Ukraine’s expertise in  countering Iran’s Shahed drones,  according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Various countries, including the United States, have approached Ukraine for help in defending against the Iranian drones, Zelenskyy said late Wednesday. He said he has spoken in recent days with the leaders of the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan and Kuwait about possible cooperation. Russia has fired tens of thousands of Shaheds at Ukraine since it  invaded its neighbor  just over four years ago, launching a swarm of more than 800 drones and decoys in its  biggest nighttime barrage . Iran has responded to joint U.S.-Israeli strikes by launching the same type of drones at countries in the Middle East. Ukrainian assistance in countering Iranian drones will be provided only if it does not weaken Ukraine’s own defenses, and if it adds leverage to Kyiv’s diplomatic efforts to st...

A Wisconsin man who allegedly told police he  tried to set fire to a Republican congressman’s office  last year because he was angry that the lawmaker backed a bill requiring TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell off its U.S. operations was sentenced Thursday to seven years in prison. In addition to the prison time, Fond du Lac County Circuit Judge Tricia Walker sentenced 20-year-old Caiden Stachowicz to seven years of extended supervision, court records show. Stachowicz, of Menasha,  pleaded no contest  to an arson charge in November. Prosecutors dropped burglary and property damage counts in exchange for Stachowicz’s no contest plea, which isn’t an admission of guilt but is treated as such for the purposes of sentencing. Stachowicz’s attorney, Timothy Hogan, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment. According to a criminal complaint, a police officer responded to a fire outside Republican U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman’s office in Fond du Lac, about 55 miles ...

Erik Brynjolfsson has spent the last several years building one of the most detailed empirical pictures of how technology is reshaping the American workforce—and the picture keeps getting darker for workers at the bottom of the corporate ladder. Last August, the Stanford economist, who has been a thought leader on artificial intelligence (AI) for years, made headlines when he and his team published a first-of-its-kind study revealing the AI revolution was already having a “significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market,” particularly young people ages 22 to 25 in white-collar fields like software engineering and customer service. Now, in a new working paper published through the National Bureau of Economic Research this February, Brynjolfsson and a team of co-authors have trained their lens on blue-collar America—and found minimum wage increases are accelerating the adoption of industrial robots on factory floors.​ Taken together, the two p...

Last week, President Donald Trump announced his plan to offer the 54 million American workers who do not have employer-sponsored retirement plans the same retirement savings plan given to federal workers that would match workers’ contributions up to $1,000 a year. The policy is just one of many on the president’s new affordability agenda and has the potential to be far-reaching and deeply impactful for low-income Americans.  The plan is the perhaps unlikely brainchild of National Economic Council chief Kevin Hassett and a progressive economist, The New School professor Teresa Ghilarducci.  While they may seem like an odd pairing, both Hassett and Ghilarducci share a passion for and deep concern about the future of retirement, she told Fortune . Americans are not saving enough for a comfortable retirement, and some are returning to work because they can’t afford not to. A self-described “retirement nerd” and advocate for social democratic policies, the 68-year-old Ghilar...

The U.S. leads the world in both crude oil and natural gas production, but the top exporters are already shipping near their capacities, allowing them to reap larger profits but not fill the supply gaps caused by the temporary loss of 20% of global oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) volumes triggered by the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz near Iran. President Donald Trump’s pledge late March 3 to insure and protect oil and LNG tankers in the effectively shuttered waterway helped stop the surge in oil and gas prices. Energy analysts have pointed to expensive or unavailable insurance coverage as a key reason for the lack of traffic, in addition to the threat of attacks. But the unprecedented explosion of a Russia-flagged LNG tanker in the Mediterranean added more unease to global energy markets. Reuters reported that Ukraine was suspected of a drone attack on the vessel. Oil, natural gas, and retail gasoline prices in the U.S. all continued to rise much of March 3, but not n...