AI Is Repricing IQ - and the Middle-Class Economy Is Breaking

by Masatoshi Nishimura

Offshoring removed labor arbitrage. Software removed routine cognition. AI removes the last cognitive subsidies.

There’s a quiet assumption baked into American politics, culture, and nostalgia: that the “good life” once offered to the average person was a baseline, and that something was later taken away.

That assumption is wrong.

What existed in 1980 was not a stable equilibrium. It was a historically rare compression of wages and status made possible by three temporary forces:

  1. Union-enforced wage floors
  2. Capital-intensive machines that substituted for cognition
  3. Information bottlenecks that required human intermediaries

When those disappeared, the deal collapsed—not because of “neoliberal betrayal” or “hollowing out,” but because the math stopped working.

Let’s be precise.

The 1960 “Great Compression”: Good Jobs by IQ Tier

In 1960, the U.S. labor market was arguably the most IQ-forgiving economy in history. Income correlated weakly with raw cognitive ability because institutions and capital subsidized large portions of the workforce.

IQ 70–85: The Protected Laborer

Archetype: Unionized manual labor
Key occupations (1960):

  • Auto assembler (Ford / GM): repetitive assembly
  • Longshoreman: manual loading
  • Meatpacker: disassembly-line work
  • Mining laborer: basic prep and haul

Why it paid well:
Union rent. These jobs were not cognitively complex, but they were politically protected. Collective bargaining forced firms to pay for compliance, durability, and risk tolerance, not problem-solving.

A UAW card (United Auto Workers) was worth +30–40% above market-clearing wages. The worker didn’t need to be adaptable; the contract was.

IQ 85–100: The Industrial Middle

Archetype: Capital-leveraged operator
Key occupations (1960):

  • Machine operators (pre-CNC lathes, presses)
  • Long-haul truck drivers
  • Steelworkers (blast furnace ops)
  • Construction trades (framers, concrete)
  • Police and fire (public-sector stability)

Why it paid well:
Machine leverage. These workers didn’t generate productivity cognitively; the machine did. Their role was supervision, timing, and physical presence.

An IQ-95 worker overseeing a million-dollar press could easily produce $50–$70/hour of value, justifying a middle-class wage.

IQ 100–115: The Bureaucratic Backbone

Archetype: Information gatekeeper
Key occupations (1960):

  • Middle managers
  • Technical sales (insurance, industrial parts)
  • Draftsmen (manual blueprints)
  • Bank officers (local credit decisions)
  • Registered nurses (often 2-year degrees)

Why it paid well:
Information scarcity. Data lived in filing cabinets. Processes lived in people’s heads. Routine judgment still required humans.

This was the “grey collar” and “pink collar” wealth tier—comfortable, stable, and quietly powerful.

IQ 115–130: The Credentialed Elite

Archetype: Novel problem solver
Key occupations (1960):

  • Engineers (civil, mechanical)
  • Corporate lawyers
  • Dentists / GPs in private practice
  • CPAs

Why it paid well:
Cognitive monopoly. If a problem was non-routine, there was no software fallback. You hired a human—or you failed.

The Critical Shift: From Human-Leveraged to App-Subordinate

The biggest misunderstanding today is the idea that “the middle was hollowed out.”

That’s lazy.

What actually happened is that leverage moved from humans to systems.

Then (1960):

  • IQ 95
  • Tool: Hydraulic press
  • Outcome: Worker is leveraged
  • Wage: Middle class

Now (2026):

  • IQ 95
  • Tool: Smartphone / POS / routing app
  • Outcome: Worker is un-leveraged
  • Wage: Near floor

The intelligence migrated upward into software. The worker became a biological API.

What Actually Disappeared — and What Didn’t

IQ 70–85: Not Gone, Just Re-Scoped

These jobs weren’t eliminated because of complexity—they were eliminated because of location arbitrage.

  • Meatpacking → Mexico / Vietnam
  • Assembly → China / automation

Where they reappear, wages reset to global levels.

This class is the place on the government subsidy today. They have been long forgotten as the economic participants.  (borderline intellectual functioning, the concept ironically emerged in 1968 as if to prepare us for the job displacement of this category).

But here’s the twist: this class is coming back—not as factory workers, but as last-meter handlers embedded by AI.

AI handles the logistics and handling of driving. The jobs will be to deliver package from the car seats to the house door.

The cognitive demand is roughly equivalent to 1960 assembly work. The difference is who handles the logistics.

The government subsidy of roughly $1000/mo will persist in the name of UBI + they'd be able to make minimum wage turning themselves to a $2000/mo earner putting them back into the economic participants.

The governments needs to culturally encourage this class to come back to the workforce ASAP.

IQ 85–100: The True Losers of the 2026–2035 Window

This is the real collapse, and it’s barely discussed honestly.

  • Truck drivers → self-driving fleets
  • Warehouse pickers → humanoid robots
  • Retail clerks → computer vision checkout
  • Machine operators → lights-out factories

This class relied on procedural stability. Automation eats procedures first.

High school + compliance is no longer enough.

They would be competing for the new jobs that are available to the IQ70-85 level of prerequisite, with much lower payout from the current $4000/mo range today.

Absolutely. I’ll keep this tight, forward-looking, and integrated, not a tangent. Think of this as sharpening the knife, not adding length.

Here’s a drop-in expansion that fits your original blog’s tone and arc.

IQ 100–115: Not “Hollowed Out” — Evacuated from Offices

This group will not disappear. It migrates—out of spreadsheets and into terrain.

What software killed was not judgment, but clerical containment:

  • Drafting → CAD + generative design
  • Routine management → dashboards, alerts, auto-escalation
  • Administrative gatekeeping → APIs, self-serve workflows

But removing paperwork doesn't remove the need for someone in charge. It removed the need for someone sitting still.

What replaces office work at the IQ 100–115 level is field autonomy paired with system command.

These roles increasingly look like:

  • Site-level operators managing semi-automated environments
  • Specialized contractors coordinating human labor, machines, and AI
  • Infrastructure, energy, logistics, and inspection leads operating outside dense bureaucracy.

The common trait isn’t manual skill—it’s contextual authority.

A modern field operator isn’t swinging a wrench all day. They’re supervising:

  • A fleet of drones doing inspection or mapping
  • Autonomous or semi-autonomous machines executing tasks
  • Software interfaces on AR glasses that integrate vision, telemetry, and alerts in real time.

This is management, but not the meeting-heavy, approval-driven kind. It’s closer to mission command: interpret signals, resolve edge cases, and decide when the system is wrong.

Think less “middle manager,” more Oblivion (2013).

In the film, humanity hasn’t lost technology—it’s outsourced it upward. The protagonists aren’t engineers designing systems or laborers executing tasks. They’re field custodians, maintaining and intervening in automated infrastructure they didn’t build but must deeply understand.

Wages might go up, but it will attract two very different types of archetype. If you call bureaucratic labor collaborative feminine with for indoor preference, this type rewards masculine autonomy seeker that is comfortable with physical strain (and risk hazard tolerance).

The current post-secondary education is radically outdated.

That’s the future of the IQ 100–115 class:
Not authors of the code.
Not replaced by the code.
But responsible for reality when the code meets the world.

Offices optimized for information hoarding.
These roles optimize for judgment under uncertainty.

And that’s why they survive.

Why the U.S. Can’t Admit the Truth

The U.S. is culturally unable to accept that the 1960 deal was temporary because it conflicts with three core myths:

  1. Moral Desert: That prosperity reflects virtue, not leverage.
  2. Upward Fairness: That every generation should do better by default.
  3. Median Centrality: That the average person must anchor the system.

But in a globalized, digitized economy, median cognition cannot anchor wages. Value accrues to:

  • Capital
  • Coordination
  • Cognitive edge
  • System ownership

1960 worked because machines were dumb, borders were sticky, and unions enforced artificial scarcity.

None of those conditions hold anymore.

The Uncomfortable Conclusion

1960 was the exception.

Not because America was kinder.
Not because CEOs were nicer.
But because leverage was temporarily mispriced.

The future doesn’t restore the old ladder.
It builds a new terrain.

And pretending otherwise is not compassion—it’s denial.