The Context Window with David Deming Podcast

What happens when AI is better than humans at every single job task? Work disappears, right? Wrong. David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - makes the case that even superintelligent AI won't end human work, thanks to the oldest non-trivial idea in economics. In part one of a two-part series, David retells the story of the mathematician who escaped Poland days before the German...

Walter Isaacson has written the definitive lives of Steve Jobs , Elon Musk , Albert Einstein , Benjamin Franklin , Leonardo da Vinci , and Jennifer Doudna . In his new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written , he turns from people to a single line — the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence — and argues it was never a description of America but a mission statement the country has spe...

As long as we’ve been collecting data, new college graduates had better odds of landing a job than the average American worker. But that flipped after the pandemic. Although the obvious suspect is AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - thinks the obvious suspect is probably innocent. In the first solo episode of The Context Window, he studies the scene of the crime: why t...

Deval Patrick grew up in a South Side Chicago tenement, sharing one of two beds with his mother and sister, and went on to become the first Black governor of Massachusetts. But in this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, he keeps correcting the version of that story people like to tell. His life did not begin with the scholarship to Milton Academy, he insists, but years earlier, with the...

Lloyd Blankfein went from public housing in East New York to the top of Goldman Sachs, which he led through the worst financial crisis since the Depression. In this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, the former Goldman CEO explains why he thinks the next big crisis will be harder to contain than 2008, why the worst move an ambitious young person can make is to skip college to chase money...

Ross Douthat has spent his career making the case for God and against the meritocracy, to readers who mostly disagree with him. In this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, the New York Times columnist argues that belief in God is more reasonable now than it was a century ago, that consciousness may be the most supernatural thing we know, and that Harvard made him more ambitious and was no...

Angela Duckworth is famous for the study grit. But in this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, she tells a messier story: ten years of feeling "capital-L Lost" after Harvard, the loneliness of achievement, and why she now believes perseverance only works when your situation lets effort pay off. Her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best , argues that grit...