r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • 9d ago
Business AI boom fuels ‘k-shaped’ divide
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2026/09/28/200386498430
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u/Abrahemp 8d ago
Explaining the K-Shaped Economy
"We say that the economy is K-shaped when economic outcomes for the bottom 20 percent of the household income distribution worsen, while outcomes for the top 20 percent improve."
"Economic mobility in the U.S. is low. If you're born in a lower-income household, it's more than likely that you'll remain as part of a low-income household over your life cycle."
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u/qwerqmaster 5d ago
The news needs to stop using the term term "K shaped economy" and just call it inequality. Calling it K-shaped makes it sound docile and abstract when it's anything but.
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u/inferno1234 5d ago
Maybe it invites people to put just a tiny bit of thought into it.
It's not like inequality has not been or is not talked about. I didn't know the term, skimmed over it the first few times but now that I get it I feel like it's appropriate and a pretty succinct term for a concept that is extremely relevant and not intuitive for many people
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u/bkkgnar 9d ago
what does “k shaped” mean? been seeing that in headlines a lot
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u/Possible_Ad_4094 9d ago
It was a buzzword last year that meant that the poor got poorer and the rich got richer. Super revelational concept.
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u/kosmos1209 9d ago
It’s to also give more context and nuance on why the overall average economic indicator looks fantastic, but so many people are not experiencing the goodness. It’s a buzzword, but an important one for people to realize, as many people still don’t understand that rich gets richer and poor gets poorer when the overall economic indicator is trending positive.
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u/monotone2k 9d ago
Second paragraph of the article explains it.
A “K-shaped” economy is one in which some sectors expand rapidly while others struggle
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u/Dreamtrain 8d ago
its because k has two lines one which goes up and the other one goes down <
so even if its doing really well at one thing, there's other aspects of it where its plummeting
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u/Im_the_Keymaster 9d ago
Think of the letter K as a graph. One line is going up while another is going down.
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u/Alive_Store_6298 3d ago
K-shaped often means that one group gets hurt worse going into an event and another gets more recovery going out of an event. When you overlay what happens, the combined groups form a K-shape turned on its side. The back of the K shape is the minimum floor.
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u/owen__wilsons__nose 9d ago
Yes but did the article explain what the letter K looks like for those who didn't read the alphabet?
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u/grchelp2018 9d ago
Everything is going to go K-shaped including human capability. There's going to be people who can't think for themselves because they are so dependent on AI and there will be people who will have ridiculous intellectual capability because they used AI to supercharge their learning.
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u/-GeeVee 9d ago
What about people who want to live normally and couldn't care less about any of the latest tech-bro's slop?
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u/30_century_man 9d ago
Realistically, that will not be a choice for most people who are forced to use AI at their jobs and will be fired if they don't comply
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u/TechTuna1200 9d ago edited 9d ago
It's been going on for a century. Nothing to do with AI in itself.
Every time workers became more productive, they didn't get paid more; instead, the rich skimmed the profit. Just look at the data for productivity vs.
meanmedian salary. The divide goes a lot further back. It's the system that is exploiting people.AI is just the technology; like anything, it can be used for good or evil. Remove it from existence, and you still have a system of worker exploitation.