ASU+GSV 2026 Summit | Tuesday, April 14, 2026, 2:00 pm-2:45 pm | Sponsored Partner Programming
Speakers
- Jim Shelton
Key Takeaways
- Jim Shelton, CEO of Blue Meridian Partners, delivers a sobering keynote framing AI not as a standalone threat but as an "accelerator" pouring gasoline on a pre-existing fire of declining economic mobility.
- Citing Larry Fink and economist Raj Chetty, Shelton reveals that a child born in 1985 has less than a 50-50 chance of doing better than their parents (down from 90% for those born in 1940), and that the median male worker in 2022 needed 62 weeks of income to cover basic living costs that took only 40 weeks in 1980.
- He argues that two-thirds of this decline is attributable to policy choices around wages, taxes, and benefits -- meaning these are reversible decisions.
- Invoking Benjamin Bloom's two-sigma problem and Chetty's Moving to Opportunity research, Shelton makes the case that "context drives opportunity" and calls for a Manhattan Project-scale investment: building an inclusive economy, using AI to reduce the cost of thriving, and reshaping the social safety net before mass displacement hits, particularly through white-collar job losses that will ripple rapidly through the economy.
Notable Quotes
"If you can change the outcome by changing the context, then it means it was never anything wrong with the kids."
— Jim Shelton
"The AI phenomenon is actually an accelerator. It's throwing gas on a fire that already existed."
— Jim Shelton
"Two-thirds of the decline in this nation's economic mobility has been tied to decisions, choices that we've made around public and private policy. Those are choices that we can make again."
— Jim Shelton
"If you thought there was a 20 percent chance of a depression-level event, what would you be willing to do to put us on a different path?"
— Jim Shelton
"The thing that motivates me is I've never been able to answer the question: which of these kids would I decide didn't deserve a shot?"
— Jim Shelton
Full Transcript
♪♪ I have to say, John asked who's been here since the beginning. I haven't been here since the beginning, but he's here at the beginning. And this has gotten about a full circle moment for me, I have to say. I've seen all day people I love, people I respect.
It's made me reflect back on things that I'm proud of that we've gotten done, that people have gotten done. You've seen the arc of the work that Michael talked about. But if I'm really honest, I also have to confess that it's one of these times when I think about all that we've done and also what we haven't gotten done. I ask the question, how much better off are our kids?
I ask, how much better is our country and the path to opportunity? Now, they let me speak. I got to tell you, sometimes I'll be kind of a downer. So, let me explain two things about me.
Three, I guess. One, I'm the CEO of an organization called Blue Meridian Partners. We are an organization that is fundamentally built on the idea of hope. Hope invested in the meaning of things that we bring philanthropists together because we know that there are solutions to the things that actually propel economic mobility.
We find them, we fund them, and we take them to scale. And in that context, we're able to change people's lives. The second thing, though, is that I'm a believer. I'm a believer in things like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And liberty and actually justice for all. That this country was built to actually fulfill those promises. The third thing is that I'm a Marvel fan, like the Marvel Universe. And that'll be important because anybody who's a Marvel fan...
Are there any Marvel fans in here? Okay. I'm sorry for the rest of you guys. But if you are a Marvel fan, you know one thing.
There's one part in the movie where it gets really, really dark. It looks like they can't come back. Charlotte goes off the waterfall, and you're not sure what's going to happen next. 50% of the people in the universe disappear, and you're not clear what's going to happen next. The reality is that in order to get to the place where you can solve the big problem, where you can tell the hero's story, you have to go through that valley.
Came up a second ago, where we talked about Jim Collins. And Jim Collins made famous a quote from Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war. It goes, you must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose, with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. So, in order for us to talk about opportunity in the age of AI, I think we have to face what the brutal facts, what the reality might be.
So, let me describe a scenario for you. Just use your imagination for a second. Imagine one in four Americans out of work. One in three households without a wage earner.
Imagine 80% of housing, home building, stopping. Imagine half of banks foreclosing behind, mortgages collapsing. Imagine many, many Americans burning through their savings or losing them all together. This is not some dystopian future that I'm projecting for 2032.
This was America in 1932. That is what the Great Depression actually looked like. And the question was, what do you do coming out of that? We now are seeing the front end of AI.
We got a little scared by what happened in the softness of new hires. And then all of a sudden, we've seen companies that were actually doing well, let go of large numbers of people. These are scary thoughts. And yet, I have to tell you, people are missing the point.
The AI phenomenon is actually an accelerator. It's throwing gas on a fire that already existed. It was recently said that, you see the quote, the massive wealth created over the past several generations flowed mostly to people who already owned financial assets. Note that says generations, to people who already owned financial assets.
Now, AI threatens to repeat that pattern at a different scale. Now, why would this person say that? Now, this wasn't, I'd say, Bernie Sanders or Zoran Mondani. This was Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, in his investment letter last year.
He said it because Raj Chetty, the economist, said famously, if you were born in 1940, you had a better than 90% chance of doing better than your parents. If you were born in 1985, it didn't fall within a 50-50 chance. He read it recently, ten years later, it's gotten worse for some. What he didn't put it together with is the cost to thrive.
The basic bundle of food and housing and transportation and education. The median male in 1980, it took them 40 weeks to earn enough to cover the basic bundle. That leaves you 12 weeks, roughly, to save, take vacations, go out to dinner, all the things in many ways that people think about to make a living. In 2022, it took 62 weeks.
If you were a woman-led household or a black and brown household, you were under order a long time ago. So, the system, the problem that we've been facing has been building for a long time, and now, I fear we may be out of time. You're like, when are we going to get to the part, the other part of the hero's journey? Here's the good news.
We know a lot about what needs to happen, an incredible amount of what needs to happen. Because people here in this room are in education, you know that the reality is the context drives opportunity. If you're at the individual student level, the environment you create, the relationship you have, the experience you provide that student creates the opportunity for something to happen, for them to achieve, for them to thrive, for them to reach their full potential. The thing that's interesting about this is that that actually scales to any scale.
It's true at the classroom level. It's true at the school level. It's true at the neighborhood level. It's true at cities.
It's true in a nation. When you create the context for opportunity, that is what drives, context drives opportunity. And opportunity is what drives thriving. We demonstrated this, Benjamin Bloom demonstrated this very clearly.
Many of you now know about the two sigma problem where he actually destroyed the thought of our current bell curve. By providing one-on-one tutors to students in safe environments, he's demonstrated that he could take F students and make them B plus students and C students and make them A plus students. Raj Chetty famously, in his Moving to Opportunity, took people from low-opportunity neighborhoods and when they were put in high-opportunity neighborhoods, they outperformed and changed their life trajectories. And the earlier you put them in that context, the better they did.
He recently did another study on the replacement of public housing with mixed-income housing and demonstrated again the ability to change people's life trajectories with that. This is not just about the specific interventions. This is about the most critical point. If you can change the outcome by changing the context, then it means it was never anything wrong with the kids.
Every challenge that we face with our education is about our ability to deliver for the children that we serve. Maybe in this room, everybody believed that. But the reality is, it has been in the way for too long. He also asked the question, after seeing this trend on social media, after seeing this trend on economic mobility, well, what would have made it better?
And when you talk to people, especially economists, the first thing they say is growth. Growth would have made it better, and you're right. We had one of the best periods of growth in our country's history after World War II. If you applied that across the board, we would fully go from 50% of people doing better than their parents to 60% of people doing better than their parents.
But what would have made it even better? If we distributed prosperity the way we did in the 1940s, salaries, taxes, benefits, shareholder distributions, if those worked the way they did in the 1940s, fully 80% of people would do better than their parents. Say it a different way. Two-thirds of the decline in this nation's economic mobility has been tied to decisions, choices that we've made around public and private policy.
What's the good news about that? Those are choices that we can make again. When we talk about the experiences that people need in their lives to thrive, this room is very clear, and the evidence is there. No surprises in the pre-K through college spectrum.
For those who don't know me, I've moved through multiple sectors, and I left the education space to focus primarily on the economic mobility space because there are other things that matter. Michael talked about the zero-to-five space and being born healthy and supported through the point to do pre-K. What happens after you get out of school to make sure you wind up in a career, and as the half-life of skills gets shorter, what do you want to do next? And then overcoming impediments.
The reason I left these up is because we have identified solutions in so many of these areas. We invested in a nonprofit called Upstream. When we invested in them in Delaware, they were able to reduce unplanned pregnancy across the state by 24% in two years and abortion by over 30%. Or invest in the Center for Employment Opportunities that takes people who have been incarcerated and gets them employed within their first year to make sure that they get on the track to economic mobility.
And I could go on and on and on. You're going to hear more from campus later on about providing education to pelligible students at no cost to them. Those experiences matter, but people's lives were made and broken where they live and work. And so you have to show up in place.
And when you show up in place, it is about the social environment, whether those relationships can form. It is about the built environment and whether or not you can actually provide housing. There are four million units between us and affordable housing for everyone in the country. It is both a large number and a known number and a solvable number.
The opportunity for us is that we are trying to figure out what is going to happen. And it doesn't really matter if you believe the scenario, the darkest scenario about AI, or you believe something different. If you thought there was a 20 percent chance of a depression level event, what would you be willing to do to put us on a different path? And the interesting thing here is that we can actually solve part of the problem, take away some of the variables by creating the context that we've talked about.
After the Great Depression, they did public works across America to try and rebuild the infrastructure of the country. And they did. They built highways and dams and airports, the things that have allowed our country to prosper over the last four to five decades in ways that many other countries did not, even though they had the Marshall Plan in Europe. Now, our plan may not look like theirs did, but they made the investment because they knew they needed to transition the economy and put in place a new infrastructure, both social and economic, to make it work.
And the question for us is, will we make those decisions in time? The thing that we have to learn to do is something that we struggle with, which is we are great when the crisis hits, or after. Depression? Work program.
COVID? Vaccines. I could go on. We've only demonstrated recently that we can make a difference.
I could go on. We've only demonstrated recently that we are really willing to move when we see one impending threat, which is good news for us because we know we can do it. However you feel about it, we demonstrated that over the last six weeks, we've invested about $50 billion because we thought something might happen. We can make a decision that we need a Manhattan Project for this age.
And what would you do? Well, you've already heard us talk about the need to build an inclusive economy that actually accelerates the pace at which we crack the code on the two-sigma problem, connects people to work in more rigorous ways, creates new jobs to fill the gaps while we figure out how we transition this economy. That's the first thing. The second thing is this cost of thriving.
We often try and solve these problems through transfers and subsidies, but what we really need is actually the innovation to actually bring the cost themselves down. We're seeing many folks do that and this is where AI once again comes in where, in fact, when you saw the Cicentrini research report that moved the stock market, part of what it did is it described how AI could help strip costs out of the system in a way that made everything available to everyone. This era of abundance that people talk about is great, it's just the problem is how fast we get there and what happens in between. But what if we could actually focus our energy on actually making affordable the things that people need to thrive?
What if that was one of the primary investment areas that AI would spend on? And last but not least, you would lean in on how you actually make government and especially the safety network differently. The thing that's interesting about AI is it's going to come through the middle first. Those displaced jobs, a lot of them in white-collar jobs and software, as you're seeing.
The thing about that is that ripples through the economy very, very quickly. So the question becomes how do you help those people transition very quickly? What does the safety net look like in that context? How do we actually support people to get the education and training that they need as they make this transition?
These are the choices that we have to make as a country. Now I told you I was a Marvel fan and I really apologize for those of you who are not. So I'm going to go to my last point here. There's a storyline in Marvel about this guy.
He actually believed that the universe was overtaxed and that in order to solve the problem, he wanted to collect those five stones you see. And what he was going to do is he would save the universe and his resources by eliminating half the people. Now think about it. If you don't know, these stones are all powerful when you put them all together.
You can create any reality that you like. If you can create any reality that you like, what makes you choose to get rid of half the people as opposed to create a universe that works for all of them? I say this to you because I get it. I guarantee you we are going to be confronted with that choice.
We are going to be confronted with the choice of will we use this technology to create a society that is actually providing opportunity for all, that does lower the cost of thriving so everything is accessible to everyone, that does create bridges for people who are unemployed to get to employment, that does reshape government so that it actually is human-centered and serves everyone well. We are going to be asked, do you want to do this? Are you willing to invest in it? Are you willing to pay the cost that it takes as long as it takes to get there?
Because we don't know exactly what's going to happen. And in order for it to really work, we have to do it before the pain starts, like in a meaningful way. So I just ask you, when the choice comes, it's easy as you sit here to say, of course. But I just want you to watch the world as it turns and think about the courage it will take and the sacrifice it will take for us to live into it.
And as you do, I want you to think about one other thing. The thing that motivates me is I've never been able to answer the question, which of these kids would I decide didn't deserve a shot? This is going to be hard. I don't know exactly how it's going to work.
What I do know is that the solutions exist. Every day we're investing in great leaders and great entrepreneurs and great organizations that are solving some of the hardest problems that we believe our society has to offer. People are getting kids ready for school. People are getting people who are hard to employ employed.
People are changing whole communities. Our investments in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Our folks from Dallas are going to be on stage later this week. It is possible.
I don't know exactly how it's going to play out at scale, but this I do know. Everything that is happening has been straining the fabric of this country. The social contract as it breaks pulls us apart. The only way we're going to solve these problems is together.
Thank you.
This transcript was put together by our friend Philippos Savvides from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on GitHub. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.