For most of history, how far a person could climb depended on what they could hold.
In the 1600s, the thing you held was land. If you owned land, you had wealth, status, and a seat at the table. Thomas Piketty spent a whole book making this point: for most of recorded history, it was inherited land and capital, not work or talent, that decided who rose.
A thin layer of nobility and the church, maybe five percent of people, held most of the land across much of Europe. Everyone else worked someone else's fields and mostly stayed where they were born, because the ladder was short and the rungs were already owned. The only way up was to acquire or occupy more land. That logic shaped geopolitics, too. The scramble for territory and colonies was among the pressures that helped tip Europe toward the First and Second World Wars.
Then the ladder changed. Over the next few centuries, the vehicle for moving up became skill and education. A person from nowhere could learn law, medicine, engineering, or finance and turn that knowledge into a career. The credential replaced the deed.
Economists even gave the new asset a name, human capital, after Gary Becker argued in the 1960s that schooling was an investment like any other. I grew up believing this version of the story. So did most of the people I work with. Turkey was a country where education meant everything.
The problem is that the asset has lost much of its scarcity. Basic education is everywhere now. The structured knowledge that once took a decade to acquire can be retrieved in seconds. AI did to the knowledge layer what Google did to the information layer, and what the spreadsheet did to the data layer before it. Each wave made the thing beneath it cheap, and knowledge is now the cheap thing.
It helps to look at what an elite MBA used to buy. For decades, the six-figure price made complete sense. You were paying for three things bundled together: a body of knowledge that was genuinely hard to find anywhere else, a credential that told employers you had cleared a high bar, and a network of people who would go on to run the institutions you wanted to reach.
All three were scarce, and the degree was the cleanest way to get all of them at once, so paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for it was a rational trade.
Two of those three have quietly collapsed. Knowledge is everywhere now, and a motivated person can learn almost everything that a degree once taught through books, a computer, and a good model. The credential still signals something, but it signals less every year, as more people hold it and as employers get better at testing for the thing itself. What is left, mostly, is the network.
The network is real, and I won't pretend otherwise. Some of the most useful introductions in my own career came through people I would never have met without a shared institution behind us.
The honest question is not whether networking is an asset. It plainly is. The real question is whether that one remaining asset is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and two years of your life, when the other two things the degree used to carry have already fallen close to free.
For most people now, I don't think it adds up. You can build a network by doing visible work in the open, by shipping something people can actually see, by being useful to a few of the right people. The degree sells access. The work earns it.
If land is no longer the vehicle, and the old kind of knowledge is no longer scarce, the open question is what actually moves a person up today.
Here is the part worth being precise about. Skill hasn't died; it has moved. AI is cheap at the bottom of the cognitive stack: recall, summary, the first competent draft. That is exactly the work that used to fill a professional's day and justify the credential.
What it does not touch is the top of the stack: knowing what is worth doing, knowing when the confident answer is wrong, knowing which thread to pull. So the premium hasn't disappeared. It has moved up to a higher floor and crowded onto a narrower one.
My answer to the question of what carries a person to that floor has three parts. Exuberance. Agency. And the human skills the machines cannot copy.
Exuberance is the input people most underrate. The psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison, who has written about this state more carefully than anyone, calls it one of the mind's most exalted, and argues that it is bound up with learning, risk-taking, and creativity itself. Not a frivolous mood but an engine.
When capability is abundant and cheap, the scarce thing becomes caring. The willingness to be intensely, visibly invested in something is rarer than it sounds. Most people protect themselves with detachment because detachment is safe and feels sophisticated. The ones who move are the ones who are openly, almost embarrassingly committed to what they're building. Exuberance is about the intensity of the attachment, how much of yourself you're willing to put on the table.
Agency is something different. It is not how much you care, it is how early you're willing to act. The world is flooded with information, and a model can summarize any slice of it in seconds, so the bottleneck is no longer knowing. The bottleneck is starting. The graveyard is full of good ideas nobody acted on. The entrepreneurs who make it are the ones who started moving while the picture was still forming and corrected themselves along the way. AI keeps reducing the time it takes for a picture to form, making waiting more expensive than ever. The window between possibility and irrelevance is narrow now, and agency is the only thing that fits through it.
The third part is the set of human skills that don't transfer to a machine. Judgment about what is worth doing in the first place. Taste, which is really just the residue of having lived with your own choices. The ability to read a room, to know which person to call, to sense when a story is being spun before anyone says so out loud. These were always present in good professionals. They were just buried under the technical work that filled most of the day. Now that the technical work is cheap, the human layer is what's left to compete on.
There's an uncomfortable echo here. Bourdieu would say that taste and knowing who to call are exactly the inherited advantages he spent his career describing, the kind that the already-advantaged pass down without thinking about it. He'd be partly right.
The new vehicle can carry old privileges just as the old ones did. But one thing has changed. You can build taste and agency in the open now by doing work that people can see. A closed network and a four-hundred-year-old name were never open to anyone. This is. The advantage still isn't evenly shared, but it is more reachable than it used to be.
None of this means the machine is the enemy. The people who win are the ones who pair well with it. I keep coming back to the centaur, the chess player who combined human judgment with machine calculation and beat both the best humans and the best computers playing alone. The advantage didn't live in the human or in the machine. It came from their partnership.
The vehicle has changed before, and the people who held the old one too tightly were left behind every time. Landowners watched the educated class pass them. The educated class is now watching the same thing begin to happen to itself.
What carries a person up today is not what they own, nor what they were certified to know. It is how much they actually care, whether they move before they're certain, and what they can still do that a machine cannot.
Cenk Sidar
