Hardly Working with Brent Orrell

From Elizabeth Warren to former president Trump, actors on both the political left and right show increasing willingness to expand the role of government in the country’s economic affairs. Skepticism of free markets, long confined to the left, is now in vogue across the political spectrum, fueling a renewed interest in industrial policy and trade protectionism.  Samuel Gregg , a distinguished...

As AI permeates our world, many are forecasting transformational impacts on work and the economy. With AI, the future is highly uncertain, but it's imperative that we prepare workers to the best of our ability today. In this episode, we bring you a live event with Brent and Shane Tews , a nonresident senior fellow at AEI and head of AEI’s Tech Policy Center, on the intersection of AI, skills, and...

In this episode, we invite you to listen in on a recent AEI event on the book System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot (Harper Academic, 2021). On June 22, 2023, AEI’s Brent Orrell and Shane Tews were joined by Rob Reich of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and Jeremy M. Weinstein of the Freeman...

In this episode, we invite you to listen in on a Workforce Futures Initiative (WFI) event from February 2023. WFI is a collaboration between the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and the Harvard Kennedy School Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy that analyzes the latest research on various aspects of the workforce development system to info...

For our 100th episode, we look back at some favorite moments in our podcast's history. You'll hear clips from conversations about the future of work with Jamie Merisotis ; male worklessness with my colleague Nicholas Eberstadt ; happiness and civic engagement with my colleague Ryan Streeter ; thinking for yourself with author and Harvard lecturer Vikram Mansharamani ; and identifying talent with r...

Joe Fuller, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at AEI and Professor at Harvard Business School, discusses two new reports, Delivering on Degrees and The Partnership Imperative. The first examines the effectiveness of programs that facilitate the transition from postsecondary education to employment and finds programs such as career coaching and experiential coursework can improve persistence in training...

The Republican Party has been the main political vehicle for American conservatism over the past 100 years. Periods of tension between the intellectual/elite faction and the grassroots faction have defined the party’s history. Matt Continetti, senior fellow at AEI, has spent his career studying the Republican Party and the American conservative movement in the 20th century, in particular the tug-o...

Responses to the sudden emergence of widely available artificial intelligence tend to swing between those who believe these technologies will deliver a utopia of unlimited growth and opportunity or inflict a robot-dominated dystopia of human obsolescence. In the space between those two polls, some are engaged in serious ethical reflection that attempts to weigh out the possible impacts of AI in li...

Scott Lincicome is the Vice President of General Economics and Trade at the CATO Institute, where he works to keep the economy open to innovation and change while preserving safety and opportunity for families, communities and the economy. In this episode, we discuss the intra-conservative debate over how to balance the need for stability in the market with openness to the innovation and change th...

In this episode of Hardly Working , I speak with Liya Palagashvili, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University as she walks us through her professional journey and research into nontraditional workers. Also known as independent workers, nontraditional workers can be defined as workers who make income outside of traditional employment and who are legally classified as...

The Nixon administration is renowned for their surprising consideration of differing social and welfare policies and the internal conflict and debate that this created within the Republican party it led. In this episode of Hardly Working , I am joined by John Roy Price, special assistant to President Nixon during the contentious time period of 1969-71 and author of “The Last Liberal Republican: An...

Workforce preparation is a crucial task that all community institutions – from families, to schools, to civic organizations – contribute to. It takes a village to make a good employee. However, few organizations, educational institutions, and nonprofits have adopted as well-rounded of an approach as the Urban Assembly, a nonprofit that equips schools to deliver social-emotional learning to student...

Economic mobility has been a trademark of the American Dream since its inception, but over time generations have found that social and economic mobility in the pursuit of such a Dream has gradually become more difficult. For writer and non-profit leader Alissa Quart, the problem of mobility is worthy of attention, as are the individual’s stories who are in pursuit of that American Dream. She has w...

Every day, thousands of decisions alter the course of our economy and the world. Economists are responsible for tracking these decisions analyzing them. Many endure long educational pathways to gain expertise to comment on economic affairs, but this expertise isn’t always necessary to gain a following or disseminate valuable information. For Joseph Politano, recent graduate of George Washington Un...

As President of Burning Glass Institute and former CEO of Emsi Burning Glass (now Lightcast), Matt Sigelman is a leading expert in real-time labor market information. This makes him particularly able to speak to workers preparing for an uncertain future with the skills required to rise in the modern economy. In this episode, Sigelman provides insight from his career in data and business, as well a...

Turn on the news, and you’ll be accosted with narratives of societal decline and tempted to despair. Dr. Eric Reinhart is one voice fighting for hope in the disadvantaged communities of Chicago, Illinois. With a kaleidoscope of degrees and credentials, Dr. Reinhart works to address both the symptoms of poverty and disadvantage by addressing their root causes. In this episode, he explains the facto...

Stephen Moret is a leading expert in the connection between education and work. In this episode, Dr. Moret shares lessons and successes from his many years leading state and local economic development efforts, educational fundraising efforts, and his new role as CEO of Strada Education Network , a social impact organization helping all students access and make the most of their educational opportu...

In their short, shared history, electrical and computing technology have fundamentally altered the way we live and work. Documents are sent in a flash, and goods are produced more efficiently than ever. While that efficiency tends to increase productivity, raise wages, and create new jobs, it also imposes costs in transitions for workers in affected industries. In this episode of Hardly Working ,...

Erik Brynjolfsson’s paper “The Turing Trap: The Promise and Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence” argues that the “imitation game” of creating tech that mimics humans has increased productivity and living standards, but does not exist without costs. Those costs make up “The Turing Trap” which happens when humans not involved in creating AI cannot compete with the productivity and efficiency...

Economic changes bring prosperity, but not without cost. The globalization of how we produce and consume has left many American workers in dead end jobs without prospects for advancement. Some critics of this change have argued for the necessity of walls to protect American industries from global competition and labor exploitation. In his new book The Wall and The Bridge: Fear and Opportunity in D...

Amidst widespread talk of income inequality and the rise in working women, many American men have retreated from the labor force steadily since 1965. Nicholas Eberstadt, AEI’s Henry Wendt Chair in Political Economy, noticed this trend in 2014 and began work on a project tracking men who lie outside the reach of traditional measures of unemployment since they are not working or looking for work. Th...

The unlimited choices we face in modernity make us restless, which is why Dr. Benjamin and Dr. Jenna Storey wrote Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment . The book explores ideas by those who have thought about and written on contentment and the application of those ideas today. Benjamin also shares about his own quest for knowledge and how it culminated in this book. Mentioned i...

How can employers find workers that fit and elevate their organizations? Where are the “diamonds in the rough” that everyone else is missing? In his book Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives and Winners Around the World , Economist Tyler Cowen and entrepreneur Daniel Gross point out helpful strategies for hiring managers to find job seekers to who aim to be noticed by the right people. Ty...

Throughout America’s history, its people formed churches, social and fraternal organizations, and neighborhood groups at an astonishing pace. When we talk about “American exceptionalism” this is what we’re really talking about: the self-organizing community that solves its own problems. In second half of the 20th century, however, scholars and pundits have pointed to a decline in American neighbor...

This episode is a rebroadcast of one of our most popular episodes! We hope that bringing it back now will allow the content to find new listeners. Enjoy! ~Hunter Dixon (podcast producer, Hardly Working ) We live in times marked by the omnipresence of the internet and instantaneous access to the accumulated knowledge of humanity. This leads us into relying on quick, narrow answers to large, complex...