Optimist Economy

Listener Max did his grad thesis on pay transparency laws in Colorado and found that they narrowed the gender wage gap by 8 cents on the dollar. But some big-name economists reported that such laws can actually reduce wages. So what’s the deal? Kathryn’s answer during our October Q&A was so overlong and multipart that we jokingly called it, “The Max Show.” So here it is, as a mini-episode. Hol...

Your drunk uncle calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Your crypto-bro cousin thinks tariffs make China pay. Your grandfather blames working women for tanking wage growth. Economist Kathryn Edwards takes on a dozen hostile dinner-table challenges to help optimists everywhere prepare for dinner table debate. Robin plays every annoying relative you've ever argued with. Pass the [expletive] gravy. Re...

Optimist Economy got its start almost exactly one year ago with a phone call that began, "Hear me out…" Thirty-two episodes later we ask, “What have we done?” Mostly we conditioned ourselves to keep our eye on the ball – the better U.S. economy and future that are possible – through a lot of very bad news days. In the background, we both moved. Kathryn kept a lot of pregnancy symptoms hidden. We i...

Why is anyone’s health insurance tied to their job? It's because of a superintendent in Dallas, World War II wage freezes, a 1953 tax code quirk, and decades of inertia. This accident of history costs America $384 billion a year in tax breaks to corporations for providing coverage. And what do we get for that? A system that locks people in jobs they'd otherwise leave, suppresses wages of those who...

In the final Q&A of the season, economist Kathryn Edwards answers listener questions on recent universal basic income experiments, legislative budgeting tricks, and the value of more aggressive IRS auditing. She also explains what eradicating the minimum wage exemption might mean, particularly for disabled and incarcerated workers. We also discuss what people actually do for money when they st...

Just how broken is Unemployment Insurance? Consider this: During every recession since the 1950s, the federal government has had to step in and prop it up. Of people looking for work, only half qualify for Unemployment Insurance. And just half of those actually receive benefits. That’s what you get from a system designed mostly for factory workers nearly a century ago and then left to the heedless...

The economic pain that Americans experienced in 2022-23 was dubbed the “vibesession,” suggesting that negative public sentiment was out of sync with a healthy economy. But what we were truly experiencing was more like a “ghost recession.” As the Fed squeezed the economy by raising interest rates from zero to above 5% to get inflation under control, only the extraordinary circumstances of the post-...

You might have heard recently that a years-long poverty study “found” that giving $333 monthly to kids with poor parents didn’t make a difference. But here's why that’s the wrong takeaway: The "Baby's First Years" study wasn't designed to test cash payments. It is multi-year, ongoing scientific research into how poverty affects child development. Researchers found "selective impacts on preschooler...

Paid family and medical leave is a confusing mess: only 27% of private-sector workers get paid leave from their employer. Some others are covered by state programs, but those vary. The rest of us scramble to patch together short-term disability with other paid time off, if we have it. Meanwhile, the United States instead has a federal Family Medical Leave Act that protects unpaid time off. Truth i...

Free breakfast and lunch for every public school student — an idea associated more with countries like Sweden and Finland — should instead be viewed as a truly American policy that liberals and conservatives can both love. Want complete meritocracy? Then you should be furious that some kids can't focus in class or during tests because they're hungry. Want to compete globally? Eating better raises...

The unemployment rate has been hovering around 4.2%. But in today’s highly unsettled economy, many people feel this headline number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t capture their economic struggles — from slow hiring to working two part-time jobs to recent graduates unable to find work in their fields. But as economist Kathryn Edwards points out, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also...

Gross Domestic Product is the big dog of economic numbers. But this measure of the economy’s size has massive blind spots. It ignores income inequality and citizens’ wellbeing. It rewards consumption and thus environmental degradation. Yes, it is vital to know if your economy is growing or shrinking and why. And yet maybe GDP shouldn’t be the lodestar. In fact, as economist Kathryn Edwards relays,...

The "boys and men crisis" conversation set in motion following the 2024 election is now shooting off in erratic directions, leading to a lot of hand-wringing about college enrollment, long-gone factory jobs, and “loss of purpose.” Still, men’s workforce participation has been on a long, slow slide for seven decades, and it is reaching a worrying level. To address that, though, we need to have hard...

About 11% of Americans have a household income that puts them below the official government threshold for poverty. Is poverty a state of being, or a risk? Are the poor people themselves the root cause of poverty? Or are they the outcome of a low-wage labor market that churns people in and out of work? Because how you diagnose the problem matters if you’re looking for solutions. Economist Kathryn A...

Economist Kathryn Edwards is back with more answers. In Part 2, she talks more about student loans, who actually “lives off taxpayers,” why gold reserves aren’t a great idea anymore, the importance of mobility in worker power, and whether ROI is a good measure for the work of government. If this two-parter was too much, blame the listener who said he didn’t like it when we used the timer back in M...

In the first of two mailbag episodes, economist Kathryn Edwards answers questions from optimist listeners on taxation on wages vs. investments, whether student loans are regressive, how bona fide economists wind up on opposite sides of policy debates, and what it really means when a Montana Congressman calls the CBO “historically wrong.” Yeah, this episode has a long title. But there was a lot of...

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour hasn’t been raised since the era of flip phones. Competing bills introduced in Congress recently would set it at $15 or $17. Is that high enough, and how can we ensure it doesn’t fall so far behind again? Minimum wage debates are dominated by worry about anticipated harms to some businesses, but ignore the proven positive effects for American workers — lik...

Labor unions’ public approval has been increasing since 2009, and is now at levels not seen since the 1960s. And yet rates of union membership have been falling. Today just 10% of U.S. workers are represented by a union, and below 6% in the private sector. What if there were a less adversarial way to get the worker-protection aspects of unions without the brutal shop-by-shop campaigns? Enter “sect...

The Estate Tax is one that half of Americans worry about, but that affects only the richest 0.07% after they die. For nearly 25 years, the U.S. has – through loopholes and ballooning exemptions – undercut a tax that could pay for some nice things, like maybe a children’s trust fund. If we chose to just dent more big inheritances, it’d also reduce the concentration of wealth and power. In this epis...

Newly minted college graduates are having a harder time landing that first job than in recent years. Is it AI? Is college useless? Is it a crisis? (No. No. And not yet.) College graduates under 27 still have much lower unemployment rates (5.8%) than their high-school-diploma peers (6.9%). What economist Kathryn Edwards finds worrying is that these new workers, who are typically a lagging economic...

One in five workers in the United States was born in another country. Without them, the country’s prime-age workforce would be shrinking, and thus so would our economy. So the calumny (Terms & Conditions) directed at immigrants is at odds with the basic fact that the U.S. needs them. What about depressing wages? Economist Kathryn Edwards says that research shows such a mixed bag of results tha...

Here’s what work requirements rarely accomplish: Getting more people to work or lifting them out of poverty. They are, however, very good at driving people off public benefit programs, which was their primary role during the welfare reform of 1996. Yes, Kathryn Edwards economist/human will tell you that in theory, people will optimize how much they work and “consume leisure” according to their pre...

The national debt is $36 trillion — a panic-inducing big number. So maybe it will help to understand how the U.S. ran up that debt. We’ve blown 37% of it on tax cuts, with precious little to show for that. But 28% went to stabilize the economy during two major crises (in ’08-’09 and during the COVID pandemic), which is when you do want the federal government to pull out its credit card. Good news...

The U.S. government makes student loans because our economy benefits enormously: Improved human capital. Higher earnings for taxpayers. Innovation and productivity gains. (Side note: Education has also been a $50 billion per year “export” because so many international students come here.) Meanwhile, colleges are basically getting blank checks for whatever tuition prices they pull out of the air. S...

Kathryn Edwards answers listeners’ economic questions, with her co-host's stopwatch running. In under an hour, we cover risks to U.S. economic data, college tuition, taxes, bonds, degrowth, mortgages, tariffs vs. income taxes, wealth concentration, and why the future can’t be built on lies. Finally, for those of you not from Wisconsin, do you know how to pronounce Waukesha? Because Robin sure didn...