Government debt, jobs, civil unrest and the concentration of wealth as AI scales.
Working thesisAI will widen the gap between owners of capital and everyone else: the ultra-rich get richer, labour markets come under pressure, already-high government debt gets harder to carry, and civil unrest rises.
This page tracks four linked claims. Every chart is drawn from public data fetched by scripts/update_data.py; anything that could not be fetched is shown as data pending, not estimated.
Government debt
The question: does AI raise growth and tax receipts fast enough to stabilise debt, or do lower labour income, bigger transfers and higher interest costs make it worse?
General government gross debt, % of GDP
% of GDP
IMF World Economic Outlook via DataMapper API. Values from 2026 onward are IMF projections (dashed).
Estimates that about 40% of global jobs are exposed to AI and discusses fiscal implications.
Unemployment and labour
Exposure is not the same as displacement. Watch the headline rate, but also the groups most exposed early: young graduates and entry-level white-collar workers.
Employer survey on expected job creation and loss to 2030.
Civil unrest
Protest counts measure mobilisation, not grievance. Rising numbers can mean a healthy democracy as much as instability, so arrests and property damage are tracked separately.
US protest events per month (Crowd Counting Consortium)
events / month
Counts computed by this site from CCC event records (online-only events excluded). Phase 2 (2021–24) and Phase 3 (2025–) use slightly different coding; treat the Jan 2025 join as a series break. Coverage depends on media reporting.
Advocacy report on the growth of billionaire wealth; useful framing, but it is advocacy.
Prediction markets
Live prices from public prediction markets, snapshotted by scripts/update_markets.py. A price of 30% means traders pay about 30¢ for a contract that pays $1 if the event happens; treat it as a crowd estimate, not a fact. Polymarket and Kalshi are real-money markets (Kalshi is CFTC-regulated); Manifold uses play money and is often thin. Long-dated and low-volume markets are poorly calibrated. Each market's exact resolution rules on the platform decide what counts, so read them before relying on a headline question.
Ṁ3k play-money · 33 traders · closes 2030-12-31 · as of 2026-10-30 17:06 UTC
Snapshot fetched 2026-10-30 17:06 UTC from public APIs (Polymarket Gamma/CLOB, Kalshi trade API, Manifold v0). Prices are what traders are paying, not my forecasts and not advice; thin or long-dated markets can be far off. Sparklines show daily prices over up to 120 days. Metaculus: API now requires an authenticated account token (HTTP 403 without one) and the website is behind a bot challenge, so Metaculus forecasts are not included. Add a ref type with a personal token later if wanted.
How to add a market
Add a ref to "markets" → "groups" → "refs" in src/themes/<slug>.json: {"platform":"polymarket","event":"<slug after /event/ in the URL>"}, {"platform":"kalshi","event":"<EVENT_TICKER>"} or {"platform":"manifold","id":"<market id or slug>"}. Optional: "markets" (list of specific sub-market slugs or tickers), "max", "sort" (date, prob or api). Then run python3 scripts/update_markets.py <slug> and rebuild.
Notes & journal
Dated observations from src/notes/ai-great-divergence.md. Add a new entry with a ## YYYY-MM-DD Title heading.
24 Oct 2026
Tracker started
Baseline as of today: US unemployment, Fed DFA wealth shares and IMF debt are loaded (see the charts for their as-of dates). ACLED global protest data is pending until an API key is added.
Question to revisit each quarter: is the youth/graduate unemployment gap widening faster than the headline rate?
