When Roosevelt took office in March 1933, the American economy was in freefall. 25% of the workforce was unemployed. Thousands of banks had failed, wiping out the savings of ordinary families overnight. And crucially, the institutions that were supposed to protect ordinary people had proven that they were never designed for ordinary people in the first place.
Roosevelt’s response was more than a stimulus package or a bailout, but rather something fundamental: the most ambitious infrastructure project in American history. The New Deal asked a simple and radical question, what would it look like if we built the systems of economic security directly for everyone?
The answer was a set of institutions so durable that ninety years later, most of them are still running from Social Security to the FDIC. These institutions enabled ordinary Americans to accumulate wealth and helped create the largest middle class in human history.
Today we are approaching a different transition, but we face the same question. AI represents the most profound economic transition since the 1930s. If the scale of disruption matches the scale of the technology, the response will require institutions as ambitious and durable as the New Deal.
But this time the response cannot come from government alone. Our political system moves too slowly for the pace of technological change. The next generation of economic security will have to be built as much by founders and technologists as by policymakers.
In other words, we need a New, New Deal. This time led by the builders.
The First New Deal
The Depression gave Roosevelt a reason to rethink a system that determines whether individuals compound upward or stagnate. And it worked. Between 1935 and 1970, the United States built the largest middle class in the history of human civilization. Not by redistributing wealth from the top, but by building systems that let ordinary people accumulate it. The compounding that followed, one of wealth, health, and opportunity, lifted an entire generation in a way that no economic program before or since has replicated.
Social Security gave workers a guaranteed income floor in retirement, the first time in American history that aging did not automatically mean destitution. The FDIC made bank deposits safe, restoring the trust in financial institutions that the crash had destroyed. The SEC brought transparency and accountability to financial markets that had been operating as a private casino for the wealthy. The FHA standardized the 30-year mortgage, making homeownership accessible to the middle class for the first time. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration put millions of Americans back to work in meaningful jobs that built roads, bridges, schools, and national parks that still exist today.
In the book, 1929, Andrew Sorkin wrote an account of how human psychology and hubris engineered the most devastating economic collapse in American history. I found the characters compelling, and all too often imperfect. One ironic detail demonstrates that imperfection: President Hoover personally chose the word “depression” because he believed it sounded less alarming than “panic” or “crisis.” He thought the name would calm people down, and surprisingly, he did little actual policy work to stem the bleeding. This was the ultimate backfire.
The lack of response by Hoover and the powerful response by Roosevelt is a lesson to be learned. Given the rate of change, magnitude, and impending implications of AI, we need to start building our economic response now. At present, to much time is spent trying to define the problems AI introduces without focusing on the solutions to what will be the most profound economic transition since the 1930s.
And this time the solution will have to come just as much from the private sector as it does from the public sector. A New, New Deal led by founders and technologists is imperative. The world is changing again and we have our Hoover vs. Roosevelt moment. We need to choose action. Relying on our broken political system for a radical infrastructure change is not feasible.
Why AI Demands A New, New Deal
The risks that ordinary Americans face today are different from 1933 but just as stark. There’s been no historical wall street crash, but the pain on main street is very real. The median American cannot withstand a surprise $500 bill. Americans approaching retirement have $82,000 in savings, while they need roughly $500,000. For younger generations, income is already volatile and non-linear as the gig economy, contract work, and the erosion of employer-provided benefits have turned the stable employment assumption inside out. Healthcare costs are rising faster than wages every single year, consuming an ever-larger share of household budgets while delivering reactive care that treats disease after it develops rather than preventing it.
And then there’s AI. The disruption AI is introducing to the labor market is not the first time technology has threatened mass displacement, but the threat of its scale and speed may be incomparable. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report projects that 92 million jobs could be displaced globally by 2030 due to automation and AI. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could automate the equivalent of 300 million full-time jobs globally. These numbers are contested as they always are during technological transitions and of course no one really knows the true impact, but the reality of disruption is clear.
This time, however, the solution will not come from the government alone. Our system is far too broken to come to bipartisan agreements on what to do next in a timely fashion. The original New Deal took two years to pass its foundational legislation and a decade to fully deploy. Government efficiency has only gotten worse, and the pace of AI disruption will not wait for the legislative calendar. Instead, what is needed is a response that operates at the speed of the disruption from the tech disruptors themselves.
How to Build the New, New Deal
It is imperative that over the next decade we as a society invest in infrastructure for everyday Americans, measuring success by the new wealth and cost savings we create. The founders that will build the next generational businesses will lean into building the foundational institutions for the New, New Deal, the equivalents of the FDIC, the FHA, and the WPA for the 21st century.
The New FDIC: AI-Native Financial Infrastructure. The FDIC aimed to rebuild trust in a financial system that had catastrophically failed ordinary people. The New, New Deal equivalent is continuous financial intelligence that understands a household’s complete economic life: income volatility, debt structure, tax exposure, insurance gaps, and long-term trajectory. Working in the background, across a lifetime, for the households that have never had a financial planner in their corner.
The New FHA: Making Homeownership Navigable Again. The FHA gave Americans access to the financial system that made homeownership attainable by standardizing mortgages and removing the opacity that kept homeownership out of reach. Today, 45 million households are mortgage-ready by income but locked out by complexity, information asymmetry, and a process designed for the 19th Century. The New, New Deal automates away the archaic processes on the backend while personalizing intelligence on when to buy, how to finance, and how to build equity over time. We must rebuild the on-ramp.
The New WPA: Putting People to Work Intelligently. The Works Progress Administration created dignified, skill-building work that left people better off than it found them, matching human capability to what the moment needed. This is perhaps the largest and most difficult task for the AI New Deal. Career infrastructure that does the same: bringing jobs that exist to workers who need them through innovative AI labor marketplaces, and providing the longitudinal career intelligence, skills development, and empathetic guidance that elite networks have always provided to the privileged. For the millions of workers navigating AI displacement, we need a system helping them succeed in volatility.
The New Public Health Infrastructure: Care That Reaches People Where They Are. The New Deal era built the public health infrastructure that extended American life expectancy dramatically by bringing basic health systems to communities that had none. The New, New Deal equivalent is shifting the architecture of care from reactive to proactive. AI makes it possible to monitor health continuously, catch signals early, and intervene before conditions become crises. This is a fundamental change in who the system can be built for. Earlier and broader care.
Roosevelt built institutions that ran for generations because he understood the assignment: not to patch the broken system, but to build a better one. The founders working on the New, New Deal understand the same thing. The window to build it is open.
Our team at Core is committed to backing the founders building this new institutional capacity.
Time is of the essence.
