AI and Inequality Break Türkiye’s Middle-Class Promise

A teenager asked her aunt, a graduate of one of Istanbul’s most prestigious schools, “Well, how much do you make?” The question came after the aunt’s niece, a high school senior, refused to study for the university entrance exam and her parents ran out of arguments. In Doğan Eşkinat’s account, it cuts through a familiar promise: study hard, work diligently and a good life will follow.

The promise loses its price

Eşkinat writes that the university entrance exam has become a central rite of middle-class life in Türkiye. Families have spent savings and weekends, and surrendered their children’s adolescence to prep schools and practice tests, trusting that a good score would open a door. Refusing the exam, he argues, means rejecting more than a test. It rejects a creed built around education and effort.

That creed had its own vocabulary. Eşkinat cites alın teri, “the sweat of one’s brow”; helal lokma, “the honestly earned morsel”; and sabır and kanaat, “patience and contentment.” The words describe a moral code in which how someone earned mattered alongside what they earned. Profiteers, lottery winners and people who “köşeyi döndü,” or “turned a corner,” were exceptions; the expected rule was that work paid, slowly but reliably.

Now, the column argues, those exceptions dominate the public picture of success. Social media has “industrialized survivorship bias,” Eşkinat writes: young people see thousands who got rich through a viral video, a lucky trade or a well-timed property purchase, while quiet, steady lives appear far less often. The contrast leaves the old advice intact in words and weakened in practice.

When work stops predicting reward

Eşkinat calls the widening gap between effort and reward the first decoupling. The middle-class ethic assumed a linear world: work twice as hard and get somewhat further. He says society increasingly operates in a power-law world, where a handful capture enormous rewards while most receive little, regardless of how hard they work. He says the shift is visible in everyday life and in the international arena.

Artificial intelligence, in his account, adds a second break: results no longer reliably show the time and effort behind them. A polished essay, careful translation or fine illustration once suggested hours of work. Now, Eşkinat writes, it may show no such thing. He asks why a teenager should spend years learning a language when a machine can translate in seconds, or practice drawing when an app can produce an illustration on command.

The change reaches beyond established professions. Eşkinat contrasts industrial-age machines, which replaced muscle and helped create work for clerks, engineers, teachers and lawyers, with current machines that target trained mental work. They also handle first drafts and routine analyses—tasks beginners once used to develop judgment. “If the machine does the apprentice’s work, who will become the master?” he asks.

The answer isn’t a lecture

The column connects the middle class to the postwar social contract: people needed to buy homes and cars, fill schools and trust tomorrow enough to borrow against it. An economy that hollows out the middle class, Eşkinat writes, is “sawing off the branch on which it sits.” His question is blunt: “If labor loses its value, who will buy what the machines produce?”

Eşkinat rejects the claim that young people are lazy. He says they have read the incentives correctly, and locates the failure in a system that has made old virtues look like a losing strategy. The middle-class ethos once gave people reasons to be patient, trust institutions and expect their children to do better. If that belief disappears, he warns, society becomes restless and resentful, more receptive to anyone promising a shortcut or naming a culprit.

He imagines the aunt answering that her work has given her competence, independence and the ability to “look anyone in the eye,” because she owes her place to no one. Eşkinat calls that the strongest case for hard work—not as an investment strategy, but as a formation of character. Yet he also says preaching virtue to young people is cheap. Society can’t keep asking them to believe in a rule it no longer honors.

Eşkinat is an Istanbul-based communicator, translator and “all-around word wrangler.” After a decade in civil service, he returns to Daily Sabah as an occasional contributor. The publication says the column’s views belong solely to the author and don’t necessarily reflect its editorial stance, values or position.