Who'll Own Your House When AI Is Finished With Your Job?

Every feed you open is arguing about whether the machines will end the species.

It is a serious argument, made by serious people, and I am not qualified to settle it. But while it runs at full volume, something duller is happening underneath it, and nobody is shouting about that at all.

A household captures a share of what an economy produces in exactly three ways. It earns from it. It owns a piece of it. Or it gets some back through the state. Wage, share, tax. There is no fourth channel.

Close all three and you do not need a machine uprising.

This is the leg everyone is already watching, so I will not spend long on it. The point worth making is that the argument does not need mass unemployment to work. It only needs income to move from labour to capital.

Output can rise. Profits can rise. The economy can look, in aggregate, perfectly healthy. What matters for a household is not whether the work exists but whether the return on it arrives as a wage or as a dividend — and a model does not draw a wage.

The obvious answer is: then own some of it. Buy the capital that is replacing the labour.

With what?

The household's borrowing capacity is already committed, and it is committed to the house. Which brings us to the part of this that is not speculative at all, because it has already happened once.

A mortgage is underwritten against income. Nothing else. So a house price is not a statement about what a house is worth — it is a statement about what a bank will lend, which is a multiple of what the buyer earns. Expand credit against a fixed housing stock and the price absorbs the expansion. The research on this is not ambiguous, and the identification is clean: in the United States, house values rise measurably when properties become eligible for cheaper conforming finance, and one study using an exogenous change in bank regulation puts the elasticity of house price growth to new mortgage credit at close to five.

What is striking is how little of that reached the people it was sold to. Mortgage liberalisation integrated fixed, local housing into liquid global capital markets, and the evidence indicates this drove house prices up across countries while doing remarkably little to broaden access to ownership.

Access was widened. Ownership was removed. The household paid for the widening on every bill for twenty-five years.

Britain has the receipt. In 1997, in 88% of local authority areas, an average home sold for less than five times average earnings. By 2025 that was true in 7% — twenty-three areas out of three hundred and eighteen.

Here is where I have to give you something that cuts against my own argument, because it is the most important number in the piece.

Housing affordability in England and Wales has been improving since 2021. The median English home cost 7.6 times median full-time earnings in 2025 — £300,000 against £39,300 — which is the lowest ratio since 2015. Since 2021, median earnings have risen 25% while median house prices have risen 5%.

That is the opposite of a housing crisis worsening. And it is the strongest evidence I have.

Because look at what did the work. Prices did not fall. Wages rose, and prices stalled while they caught up. The ratio moved because the denominator moved.

The house did not become cheaper. The wage became bigger. That is the whole mechanism, running in the direction that helps you.

Which tells you exactly what happens when it runs the other way.

Which leaves the state. Tax the machines, or the people who own them, and route some of it back.

This is the leg people assume is safe, because it looks like a political choice rather than a structural one. Rates can be raised. Governments change. And for a while it genuinely looked as though the political will had arrived: more than 140 countries signed up to a 15% global minimum tax on multinationals turning over €750m or more.

Watch what happened to it. In January 2025 the United States withdrew support and threatened retaliatory taxes on any jurisdiction applying top-ups to US profits. By June a G7 statement had recognised the US regime as functionally equivalent. On 5 January 2026 the OECD published the Side-by-Side package, exempting US-parented groups from the two main charging provisions — the income inclusion rule and the undertaxed profits rule — on the basis that existing US law does the job.

One assessment called it a system that simultaneously waters down and preserves the global minimum tax. That is fair, and it is also the pattern. The rule survives. The companies it was built for are outside it.

And none of this required anybody to break a law. The value in an intangible business sits where the intangible is registered, not where the customer lives. This is not exotic; it is how software has been taxed, or not taxed, for thirty years. What changes is the proportion. The more of an economy that consists of models, patents and code, the less of it stays anywhere long enough to be assessed.

Nobody hid it. Nobody had to.

One objection deserves taking seriously, because it is the strongest one. House prices cannot fall forever. There is a level at which the asset is simply cheap, and somebody buys.

True. The floor is rental yield.

Now look at what that floor actually is. It is the price at which an investor will buy the house in order to rent it to the person who used to own it.

The bottom is not a price. It is a change of ownership.

So the scenario was never a crash that destroys housing wealth. It is a transfer. Income falls, the repayment cannot be met, the asset is bought at the yield floor, and the former owner pays rent to the new one. The house stays exactly where it is. The deed moves.

I should be straight about what is evidence here and what is not. That house prices track borrowing capacity, and borrowing capacity tracks wages, is established. That the global minimum tax has been hollowed for the firms it was aimed at is a matter of public record, dated and published. What happens to wages from here is nobody's evidence. It is a guess, and mine is no better than yours.

But the machinery does not care which way the wage moves. It only multiplies.

Everyone is arguing about whether AI will end the species. Nobody is asking who will own your house when it is finished with your job.