The Economics of Work — a podcast by Revelio Labs
Latest episode
Episode 20 · Anna Stansbury · 49 min
Worker Power, Wages, and What's Gone Wrong in the American Labor Market
The labor share of income has dropped from roughly two thirds to below sixty percent since the early 1980s. The US looks like an outlier even among rich countries. In this episode, Ben sits down with Anna Stansbury, MIT economist and co-author with Larry Summers of influential work on worker power, to dig into what's driving wage stagnation and which institutions might fix it.
Previous episodes
Episode 19 · Paul Osterman · 52 min
The Disposable Worker: How Firms Learned to Stop Investing in People
The postwar employment contract, characterized by stable jobs, career ladders, wages that rose with productivity, didn't dissolve overnight. Firms chipped away at it deliberately, and the result is a labor market organized around workers who were never meant to stay.
Episode 18 · David Deming · 48 min
What's Happening to Young Workers, and What College Should Do About It
For the first time in recent history, new college graduates have a higher unemployment rate than the general population. The causes are tangled, the implications are serious, and universities are caught in the middle. In this episode, Ben sits down with David Deming, Harvard economist and Dean of Harvard College, to work through what's driving the shift and what it means for how we think about education, expertise, and careers.
Episode 17 · Ioana Marinescu · 50 min
Why Workers Are Underpaid, and What We Could Do About It
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.
Episode 16 · Roberto Rigobon · 57 min
Why We're Getting Worse at Measuring
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.
Episode 15 · Deena Mousa · 37 min
What AI Means for the Developing World
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.
Episode 14 · Luis Garicano · 50 min
Why the Most Valuable Work Is the Hardest to Automate
The jobs most protected from AI aren't necessarily the most credentialed ones. They're the ones where tasks are so tightly bundled together that pulling one thread unravels the whole thing. In this episode, Ben sits down with Luis Garicano, LSE professor and author of Messy Jobs, to dig into what makes some work durable, how organizations need to reconfigure around AI, and why Europe may be in serious trouble.
Hosted by Ben Zweig
Ben Zweig is a labor economist and the CEO of Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence company. A passionate advocate for understanding the evolving nature of work, Ben also teaches The Future of Work at NYU Stern. Before founding Revelio Labs, he was a Managing Data Scientist at IBM’s Chief Analytics Office and a Quantitative Strategist at an emerging markets hedge fund. He holds a PhD in Economics from the CUNY Graduate Center, and he is the author of Job Architecture: Building a Language for Workforce Intelligence.
“Ever since taking my first economics class 20 years ago, I’ve been trying to learn as much as possible about how and why we do what we do. For me, the best way to do that is to listen to the people who have thought the most deeply about it.”
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