ECON OF WORK - Private feed for review

The economy is changing faster than our ability to track it. And the data sources we rely on most, like surveys, official statistics, and government indices, were designed for a world that no longer exists. In this episode, Ben sits down with Roberto Rigobon, MIT economist and founder of the Billion Prices Project, to explore what gets lost when measurement fails. Topics covered: Why survey respon...

Most people earn less than they're worth. Not because they're not productive, but because the labor market isn't nearly as competitive as it could be. In this episode, Ben sits down with Ioana Marinescu, professor at Penn and one of the leading researchers on labor market power, to dig into what monopsony actually means, why it matters, and what it would take to fix it. Topics covered: What a perf...

The story of foreign aid is usually told as a story of insufficient resources. Bill Easterly thinks that misses the point. In this episode, Ben sits down with Bill Easterly, NYU economist and author of four books on development, to dig into why aid so often fails, and why the problem runs deeper than most people are willing to admit. Topics covered: From disappointment to concern: how Easterly's v...

The standard debate about AI and jobs is a rich-country debate. But for billions of people in low- and middle-income countries, the stakes and the story look completely different. In this episode, Ben sits down with Deena Mousa, program officer at Coefficient Giving and writer on AI and global development, to explore what gets missed when we only think about AI's impact through a Western lens. Top...

The debate about immigration is usually framed around politics and labor markets. But the deeper story includes mobility. Who gets ahead, how, and why where they start determines so much about where you end up. In this episode, Ben sits down with Leah Boustan, professor at Yale and co-author of Streets of Gold , to dig into what the data on immigration reveals about economic opportunity across gen...

The backlash against AI among young people appears codependent as they rely on it for more and more, while also being some of its most vocal opponents. In this episode, Ben sits down with Jasmine Sun, writer and journalist covering the AI economy, to explore what youth sentiment toward AI reveals about jobs, inequality, and the world being built around us. Topics covered: Why young people's hostil...

What does it take to connect the worlds of academia, government, and industry around workforce development? The answer requires someone fluent in all three. In this episode, Ben sits down with Rachel Lipson, researcher at Harvard, fellow at Brookings and the Aspen Institute, and author, to explore what's working (and what isn't) in America's approach to training workers for the jobs of today and t...

What actually happens to a job when AI touches it? The answer depends on something most frameworks aren't designed to measure. In this episode, Ben sits down with Daniel Rock, assistant professor at Penn and co-founder of Work Helix, to dig into AI exposure. Topics covered: What "AI exposure" actually measures Why tasks are "assemblages," not atoms, and what that means for how we think about job c...

The dominant framework for measuring AI's impact on jobs may be asking the wrong question entirely. In this episode, Ben sits down with Isabella Loaiza, economist and researcher at MIT, to challenge some of the most widely accepted assumptions in the AI and work debate. From the concept of "exposure" to the narrative of an incoming white-collar bloodbath, Isabella makes the case we're missing a bi...

Finance has net present value. Operations has bottleneck theory. What does HR have? In this episode, Ben sits down with John Boudreau, professor emeritus at USC and one of the most influential thinkers in the history of human resource management, to explore a question he has spent 40 years trying to answer: why do leaders who make rigorous, model-driven decisions about financial and operational as...

Most conversations about the future of work focus on technology. This one focuses on people. In this episode, Ben sits down with Alexis Fink, organizational psychologist and president of SIOP — the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology — to explore what over a century of behavioral science actually tells us about how work gets done, why organizations succeed or fail, and what leaders ge...

Five years after the pandemic reshaped where and how we work, where have we actually landed? In this episode, Ben sits down with Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford and the world's leading researcher on remote and hybrid work. Drawing on surveys of hundreds of thousands of workers across many countries,Nick unpacks what the data actually shows about productivity, innovation, and the fut...

What makes a transaction repugnant? And why does society allow some controversial markets to flourish while banning others that seem far less harmful? In this episode, Ben sits down with Al Roth , Nobel laureate and professor of economics at Stanford, to explore the hidden moral architecture beneath the markets we take for granted, and the ones we don't allow at all. Drawing on his new book Moral...

In this episode, Ben sits down with David Autor, professor of economics at MIT, to explore how technology transforms work at every level from individual tasks to entire industries. Topics covered: Why transformative technologies require organizational reinvention, not just adoption The "expertise framework": how the same automation can be a force multiplier for one worker and a threat to another,...