III. Reverse Black Death

In this essay

The Black Death killed a third of Europe’s population and, by creating an acute labor shortage, dramatically increased the bargaining power of surviving workers. AGI threatens to do the opposite: a massive expansion of cognitive labor supply that could depress the value of human expertise across every knowledge-intensive profession.

The laborer is worthy of his hire. —Luke 10:7

The Original Black Death

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When the Black Death swept through Europe between 1347 and 1351, it killed between 30 and 60 percent of the continent’s population. The immediate economic consequence was a dramatic increase in real wages for the survivors.1 Land was abundant, labor was scarce, and the feudal system began its long unraveling.

Labor in the Age of Inference

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The Professional Class Under Pressure

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Historical Parallels and Divergences

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  1. The wage data for post-plague England is meticulously compiled in Robert C. Allen, “The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War,” Explorations in Economic History 38 (2001): 411–47. ↩︎

  2. David Autor, “The Labor Market Impacts of Technological Change: From Unbridled Enthusiasm to Qualified Optimism to Vast Uncertainty,” NBER Working Paper 30074 (2022), provides the most comprehensive survey of how economists think about technology and labor markets. ↩︎

  3. The comparison between plague-era labor dynamics and AI-era labor dynamics is developed more fully in Niall Ferguson, “The Second Black Death?” Bloomberg Opinion, March 2025. ↩︎

Next in series: IV. International Consequences of AGI →