INCOME: ‘Superstar’ Companies Are Eating Into Workers’ Wealth, Study Finds.

“The aggregate share of labor falls as the weight of superstar firms in the economy grows,” the paper’s authors conclude. They are economists David Autor, Christina Patterson, and John Van Reenen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Lawrence Katz of Harvard University; and David Dorn of the University of Zurich. The research was released in January as a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research [PDF].

The paper doesn’t name the superstars but notes that “firms may attain large market shares with a relatively small workforce, as illustrated by Facebook and Google.”

The study’s implications for policy are ambiguous. Donald Trump has promised to lift the wages of ordinary Americans but has also spoken positively about the contributions of U.S. tech giants—not just Facebook and Google but also Apple, Microsoft, Amazon.com, and others. “I’m here to help you folks do well,” he said at a summit with tech chief executive officers in December. Superstar companies can make the pie bigger, so squelching them probably wouldn’t make workers better off.

“It’s not immediately obvious what the policy would be” to reverse the downward trend for labor, Autor said in an interview.

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, “thinking machines” had long been outlawed to protect mankind from their harmful effects, but the resulting oppressive empire ruled by shifting coalitions of noble families probably isn’t the political cure America is looking for.