“Love you all, but there’s a few people in here that have a lot more money than me. If you are a billionaire, why are you a billionaire?” Billie Eilish, after receiving the Music Innovator Award. At the ceremony, Stephen Colbert announced that Eilish donated $11.5 million from her “Hit Me Hard and Soft” tour proceeds toward “organizations, projects and voices dedicated to food equity, climate justice, reducing carbon pollution and combating the climate crisis.”
This morning’s New York Times features an economic warning from economist Rebecca Patterson, This Is How Our Economy Comes Crashing Down. This sentence caught my attention: According to Federal Reserve data, the top 10 percent of American households by wealth owned more than 87 percent of the country’s corporate equities and mutual fund shares as of mid-2025.
Small companies reeling from tariffs are laying off workers and not hiring new ones. The federal government is laying off workers. Large firms are replacing human jobs with AI. Patterson writes: Indeed, the public and private sector together in October announced the largest monthly number of layoffs in 22 years, according to data from the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas.
Ford CEO Jim Farley says there are plenty of jobs, but we are not training our citizens to fill them. “We are not talking about this enough. It’s a very serious thing. We don’t have trade schools. We are not investing in educating the next generation.”
New York Magazine writer Lane Brown explores the puzzling divergence between past decades’ rising IQ scores (the so-called Flynn effect) and current signals of cognitive stagnation or decline (e.g., falling standardized test scores, rising ignorance, weaker critical-thinking measures). He asks: why might we now be getting “dumber”—or at least failing to get smarter? He argues one major culprit is unfettered social-connectivity: the fact that everyone has immediate access to everyone else’s thinking, which shapes how we think and what we expect from our brains.
Perhaps machines getting smarter and us getting dumber explains the rise in layoffs. Either way, Patterson says: Without income from jobs, consumers pull back on spending. That in turn means less revenue for companies, which makes them more cautious and makes the Jenga tower much less stable.
Patterson compares the American economy to a Jenga tower: In the game of Jenga, players remove wooden blocks from a tower and place them on the top. With each move, the tower gets taller and increasingly unstable, until it collapses.
The base of the tower, the foundation that holds it up, is a small group of rapidly growing AI companies that have created many of those billionaires who own America today, politically and financially. What could possibly go wrong?
What could topple the tower? A.I. firms could hit constraints, such as energy needed to power data centers. They might not show as much revenue for their efforts as expected. Any number of catalysts, such as stubbornly high inflation that limits consumption and slows the pace of Fed rate cuts or a Chinese technology breakthrough, could knock the stock market sideways.
It’s far from clear what comes next. One thing we do know: Jenga towers eventually fall down. (Patterson)
That’s what.
Stay tuned.