Pod Insights Optimist Economy AI Suggested Five Horrible Titles for This Episode About this episode A recent article in the Washington Post proposed that U. S. labor data has just started to show the bite artificial intelligence is taking out of U. S. jobs – in this case, for computer programmers. Is AI going to cause mass joblessness? Silicon Valley bros seem to think so. Journalists seem to think so. So what’s with economist Kathryn Edwards' ho-hum reaction? The long view: The United States has seen lots of technological progress over time, but technology has been the most villainized since 1980—also the era of declining worker power. It’s our gutted worker protections that make periods of technological transition so painful.
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Read More:
More than a quarter of computer-programming jobs just vanished. What happened? https://wapo.st/4lfGdue [The Washington Post]
Majority of U. S. adults think AI will eliminate jobs over next two decades, but experts’ views are more mixed https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/pi_2025-04-03_us-public-and-ai-experts_0-05/ [Pew Research Center]
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:33 Speaker 02 Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine.
0:36 Robin Rauzi? I'm Robin.
0:38 Speaker 02 On this show, we believe the US economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there, one problem and solution at a time.
0:51 Robin Rauzi? So this is a big week for us here at Optimist Economy.
0:54 Speaker 02 Huge week, huge week.
0:57 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, we went live with our first episode. So I feel like, I feel like this episode that we're doing now is like time travel, like we're talking in the future to the people who are listening to something we recorded in the past.
1:09 Speaker 02 Yes, it's very, I mean, I don't want to go too deep on a Christopher Nolan-type timeline for our listeners, but yes, when we're recording this, it is probably a month after we have gone live, but it's the first episode we're recording since having posted the show. And I, I had a friend ask me why we recorded so many episodes before we posted them. And I, I was like, I don't know, I was just hella nervous and I needed to feel like I could actually do this a few times before we put it out in the world, like it wasn't a total disaster.
1:44 Robin Rauzi? I think that it makes
1:45 Speaker 02 I don't know.
1:46 Robin Rauzi? It made not just us more comfortable to, to have a few in the, in the bag. I, I think, for me, anyway, it was also useful for us to go through the whole process of editing it and having Sophie produce it. It just made us understand what the whole process was going to be like before we made everything live. Do you want to talk about any of the letters you got or the note, the emails that came in or responses?
2:13 Speaker 02 I, as I put out in my comments, I mean, my, the very first reaction we got was my husband put into a group text the first episode. Of course, I'm on the group text and someone wrote back, "In this economy?" And then, you know, laughed and was like, "Very genuine. Congratulations. Can't wait to listen." One of our first emails was, "Do you think it's appropriate to be optimistic right now?" And I, you know, emphatic, "Yes." And as I explained in my newsletter, "Y'all, we deserve to be optimistic. We live in a remarkable economy that has so much potential. We are sitting on a goldmine of good ideas that we haven't put into practice. You should absolutely feel like we are going to have a bright, bright
2:57 Speaker 02 future because we can." Yeah, there's been some pretty bad news days since we started recording and they've definitely left a bad taste in my mouth and made me feel not that great, but it doesn't, it doesn't change the fundamentals of the economy or the future that we can build.
3:14 Robin Rauzi? All right, we're going to do some things like we normally do and a few things that are a little bit different. First up is retcon. Catherine, did you have any, any retcons this week?
3:24 Speaker 02 Well, we did mention in the show that we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and neither of us knew where that came from. And it turns out it's an incredibly, honestly frighteningly literal phrase from the Middle Ages, when bathwater was dirty to the point you couldn't see a baby inside. So I'm just not going to talk about that anymore. It was a horrifying retcon and I would like to quickly move on from that retcon to, you know, last, last time we talked about new work standards and basically reframing what is a normal work relationship that you have with your employer and what is the exception versus the rule. And I wanted to just emphasize that we need a whole new set of work standards
4:08 Speaker 02 in the United States, not just around remote work, but we need a new Fair Labor Standards Act. We need a new National Labor Relations Act, which is the protection for our right to organize and unionize. We need new safety and health standards. So we'll talk a lot more about workplace standards and safety and protection on the show and that this is- It's just one sliver of an issue and by no means the whole cake.
4:32 Robin Rauzi? And I've seen the list of topics, so she's not lying. It's a long, it's gonna be many, many parts to these stories. I made a accidental reference to Goldman Sachs, but of course, what we meant was JP Morgan Chase. It was the CEO, Jamie Dimon of Chase, who made the rant about people working from home. So I did a little reading on that and found out that the guy who asked the question at a town hall that set this rant in motion was an IT worker asking whether managers could be empowered to make the decision about remote work. And his team was scattered over seven locations. So we couldn't really figure out why they needed to come and work together in the office when they wouldn't be remotely
5:16 Robin Rauzi? together. Anyway, there's, we'll put a link up to the actual recording and the story about the question that led to it.
5:23 Speaker 02 You know, I've been known to be a bit of a live wire in town halls. But I think I would have appreciated an honest answer from a town hall. I mean, at the least, you know what Jamie Dimon thinks about it. Not much, but it wasn't couched behind like corporate talking points.
5:40 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, his, the guy's bosses weren't very happy about it. Let's just say that.
5:46 Speaker 02 Terms and conditions. Do you have any terms?
5:48 Robin Rauzi? I don't have anything.
5:48 Speaker 02 You have no terms?
5:49 Robin Rauzi? No, it's all you.
5:50 Speaker 02 I have a great one, which is heel turn. My husband said this in passing. He said, hey, every season needs a heel turn. We were watching the NWSL, which you and I are both devoted fans of. And one of my favorite teams was both winning a game and being a little chippy. And when you're up by two, when you have three yellow cards, like you are the bad guy. And I said, I was kind of surprised that they were playing like this. And he's like, every season needs a team to heel turn. And I had no idea what heel turn was. So I looked it up. Heel turn is from pro wrestling, where the good guys are called faces and the bad guys are called heels. And when you do a heel turn, it's
6:31 Speaker 02 when a face becomes a heel. Now, if anyone who is listening actually follows wrestling, I really hope I said that correctly, because that's like, straight from Wikipedia. But it is mean like the character, you know, like you go from good to bad. And it actually kind of like my papoochiki, heel turns are a great description for a lot of people in Congress right now, where it's like, kind of waiting for you to do the good thing, buddy. Remember this little thing called the Constitution? Waiting for that heel turn back when you become a face and then-
7:05 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, can you only turn toward heel or can you turn away from heel?
7:08 Speaker 02 Maybe it's reversible. Is a heel turn reversible? We'll find out.
7:11 Robin Rauzi? Is it a face turn?
7:11 Speaker 02 I don't know. I've never heard this. I guess people use it to talk about characters in TV shows.
7:17 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
7:17 Speaker 02 Like when they become the bad guy, this is a heel turn. So I like this being popularized. This is fun. The other thing I looked up apropos of a conversation that we had after our first episode dropped was backhanded.
7:31 Robin Rauzi? Oh.
7:32 Speaker 02 Commonly used in backhanded compliment when someone says something that's actually devastating. Backhanded comes from, this is like Middle Ages, everything on the left-hand side is evil. So backhanded comes from like using your, instead of your right hand, using your left hand. And so it's like, it's originally like it was a left-handed thing, like a left-handed compliment, but you know, we use backhanded and that was slang for left-handed was backhanded.
7:58 Robin Rauzi? You're not a lefty, are you?
7:59 Speaker 02 No, I'm not.
8:00 Robin Rauzi? I'm not either, but Amy is and she'll go on and on about how, how they've been maligned by every, everything and you know, semester, all these words that come from being left-handed.
8:11 Speaker 02 Imagine being a left-handed redhead. I mean, like what?
8:14 Robin Rauzi? Terrible.
8:16 Speaker 02 Historical bad people, redheads and left-handed. So I did have to look up where backhanded came from and it's just another slang for lefty.
8:25 Robin Rauzi? Mm-hmm.
8:26 Speaker 02 Okay, to be fair, this is when I need to be truthful because honesty matters. I don't pay for an OED subscription. So the Oxford English Dictionary has a lot to say about backhanded. A lot of it's behind a paywall. So I really got like the first two sentences of like, oh, it started with left hand. Then it was like, you need to pay for your credit card. And I'm like, whatever. It's just a podcast.
8:50 Speaker 02 We had to look up backhanded because most of the feedback we've gotten about the podcast has been very nice, but there's been a fair number of backhanded compliments that we've gotten also. And so we had to, it made me want to look up backhanded. You know, taking this turn of our show now actually being public, which of course, we always wanted to do, is a harsh reminder that-
9:14 Robin Rauzi? We're going to hear some stuff.
9:15 Speaker 02 We're going to hear some stuff. Some of it will be backhanded, some of it will be fronthanded. But I, I think the overwhelming sense I got from when we put the first episode online was that there are a lot of optimists out there and that we will have a community of optimists on this journey with us. And that made me feel very good.
9:35 Robin Rauzi? That's good. That's good. All right. So we're going to try something a little bit different for the centerpiece of our show today, so that we're not always coming up with articles that Catherine has to then go write, which seems like a lot of homework for her in addition to running this podcast.
9:53 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, okay, so the pitch meetings are very much like, we're centering the discussion around a would be essay.
9:59 Robin Rauzi? Right. I don't know if you got that, but that's what we've been doing.
10:03 Speaker 02 That's lost on you. Maybe you'll backhand and let us know how you think about that. But in theory, like this is really about me trying to come up with an essay. That's going to be a lot of work. We need to step back from a weekly essay commitment because I have a weekly column commitment already. I don't want to lose like the one job I still have.
10:23 Robin Rauzi? Yeah. But this is going to be a discussion about something that I've been reading and wondering what you, what you were thinking about, about it. So I sent, I sent poor Catherine a bunch of articles. These are not necessarily good articles. We'll, maybe we'll link them in the show notes, maybe not. I don't know. There were three articles and what, what I, I didn't like any one of them particularly individually, but collectively, they all sort of- Came into view in about 24 hours and they all seemed to be looking at the same intersection, in this case of AI and jobs, from three different corners of that intersection, right?
11:01 Robin Rauzi? So, one was looking at some Bureau of Labor Statistics data about a drop off in computer programmers as a job category. And one was from a management consultant talking about businesses and whether or not they should have an AI strategy and saying, basically, that businesses are not prepared to have an AI strategy and they probably shouldn't have an AI strategy. And then the third was sort of a very slight piece in The Atlantic about-
11:36 Speaker 02 Oh, yo, that is such a devastating way to describe it. I love that. I'm taking that. My god, I might get that tattoo. That's a slight piece? Oh, my god, Robin, that is amazing. I've never heard an essay described like that and I am so delinquent. Well, you were, you were an actual writer and editor, but I play one on TV. I'm supposed to be an economist. You already know how well my wordplay works out. Hint, hint, optimist economy.
12:07 Robin Rauzi? Two nouns. Anyway, it was, it just was sort of from the point of view of the Silicon Valley tech bro AI revolution coming to change everybody's jobs.
12:20 Speaker 02 Sure.
12:21 Robin Rauzi? And I don't know that it advanced what's already out there, but it sort of restated a lot of the stuff that's already been suggested in the, now in the context of, you know, the new generations of AI being, becoming AI agents, not just chatbots, for what that's worth.
12:37 Speaker 02 I kind of think this segment is like Catherine makes you feel good about something doomeristic you've read in the news.
12:44 Robin Rauzi? Yeah, I think that that's sort of true. There's so much stuff written about AI and most of it makes my eyes glaze over, I will be honest. But what I thought was interesting about these, just when, you know, when three articles sort of all have a totally different viewpoint on something at the same time, it just makes me think no one knows anything.
13:04 Robin Rauzi? And so I went back to find another article from, I can't remember if it was an HBR or something from like 2009 or 10, which was one of the first pieces to say how many jobs could be affected by automation. And this was before we were anywhere near ChatGPT, right? I couldn't find it, but instead I found that other article, which made me super angry, but you and I probably both for different reasons, but about how economists think about the job disruption that will or will not be coming from new technologies and from AI specifically.
13:37 Speaker 02 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we got a couple of questions. We, you know, I definitely hit the streets and said, please email [email protected] your economic questions and worries. And we did get, one of our first emails, other than some backhanded compliments, one of our first emails was, is AI going to cause mass joblessness? And I, I think that it's reported on a lot. The advancements are reported on a lot. And you have, you know, like the array of pieces that you talk about. I mean, you just have so many long think piece essays questioning what the future really means when AI is there and what it means for the economy and what it means for the labor market. And yeah, I mean, I think
14:19 Speaker 02 people are legitimately afraid that AI is going to take a piece of the economy. In fact, I was on a podcast as a guest where she brought this up and she said, like, you know, is every white collar based city going to be the next Youngstown, Ohio when AI takes all these jobs? So there's, there's definitely a sentiment that like AI is something that we need to be afraid of and is, it is coming for our jobs and could create a whole new economic era and equilibrium in which a lot of people don't have anything because AI is doing the work that they could be paid for, but they're not anymore.
14:57 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
14:59 Speaker 02 For the record, I think it's all bullshit, just saying.
15:02 Robin Rauzi? Get that thesis in there, right at the top.
15:04 Speaker 02 Sorry, I didn't, I didn't put that in right at the top. I just talked about all the ways that people are worried about it. And I'm like, y'all not that worried here.
15:12 Robin Rauzi? So you're not that, okay. So obviously, I've talked to other people about this too. And, and they are also of the belief that generally, technology makes people more productive, that causes economic growth, that that leads to more, more jobs overall, eventually. So my attention was grabbed by the Department of Data piece in the Washington Post that saw what was like a 27% decline in computer programmers, though not in software developers, which, you know, for most of us is a distinction without a difference. It could be the great inflation of your job title.
15:46 Speaker 02 There is, there is tangible job loss occurring from AI right now in this moment. Yes. That is absolutely true. And I think it's, it's something that
16:01 Speaker 02 the people who are most comfortable using AI tools are people who are in tech-related jobs. And one of the best functions, if you are using an AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude, is that it, it makes it a lot easier to program. So I don't know, have you ever programmed?
16:21 Robin Rauzi? Me? Not since, you know, high school. But I did use Claude to actually come up with an Excel formula for me the other day.
16:27 Speaker 02 Yes. So they're, it's like, they're not so good at human things, but they're pretty good at computer things, like writing a programming language. And so a lot of people have been using it to say, like, write code in this language. And so rather than you having to generate a thousand lines of code, it generates it and then you go through and check. And that has led to, at least in part, a reduction of computer programming jobs. But yeah, even then, I still, I would say, you don't need to be worried about this. Like you person in the world, if you have a job in which you think you are very vulnerable to AI, I think your worry is, I'm not going to tell you what your worry is, but like, the concern for me is not about the technology itself.
17:11 Speaker 02 It's about how much power workers have in the economy. And how poorly the economy treats unemployed people. I mean, neither of those two things, worker power or the treatment of the unemployed, have anything to do with AI and have everything to do with the bad decisions that people in charge of the economy have made over the past 40 years.
17:30 Robin Rauzi? I just want to see if I can sum up what you're saying there. You're saying you would be less worried about people losing their jobs to AI if we had some better way to treat them when they become unemployed.
17:38 Speaker 02 And that has, I mean, I feel that way about people who lose their job in recessions, people who lose their job when their firm closes and their firm did nothing related to AI, people who will be hurt by the tariffs and the retaliatory tariffs that are going to hit the US and they're going to be in trouble. And then, again, it doesn't matter where the negative shock comes from, the US doesn't treat unemployed people that well. That is the problem, not necessarily where it came from, but-
18:02 Robin Rauzi? Then tell me why you're not, you're not that concerned about AI leading to job loss is going to throw people into this system that you've just said is bad.
18:10 Speaker 02 Well, okay, so, fair point, Robin.
18:15 Robin Rauzi? Thank you.
18:15 Speaker 02 I guess, I guess, it's, there's a couple of things going on. One is, you have all these navel-gazy, doomerist pieces about what AI is going to do to the economy and if it's going to remake it and humans will become less necessary in the workforce and we'll have like a reduction in jobs because AI can do all of them. And I think that, for the most part, is like, hyper-overblown and mostly bullshit. Because this goes back to, what does technology do? It makes people more productive in their, like, whatever widget it is they're working on in the economy, whether that widget is an email or a computer or a sale or a piece of machinery or a piece of fabric or what have you.
18:59 Speaker 02 Technology, especially in economic terms, technology isn't computers for us. Technology is how goods become transformed before they enter the market. Technology could be how you make shoes. Like, I turn leather into shoes. How do I do that? That's a technology right there. You can have changes to technology that changes production. It's always updating and evolving. And what makes people so worried about the tech technology changes, things driven by like computers and electronics and things like that, is because those are the technology changes that occurred during a period of really reduced worker power. I am of the belief that technology is an incredible fall guy. Like, it is such a get out of jail free card
19:44 Speaker 02 for all the horrible economic decisions policymakers made that stripped workers of their power and leverage in the labor market. Unionization, right now, is lower than it was before we had the nationally enshrined law and right to unionize in the National Labor Relations Act. Employers have fought this law so hard for the past 90 years, it is as if it doesn't exist. That does more to the inequality and wage problems in the labor market than technology ever could. It just so happens that some of it happened at the same time.
20:16 Robin Rauzi? You think we're looking at the wrong thing, right?
20:18 Speaker 02 Like, I mean, you didn't have any, like, doomerist pieces about how air conditioning was going to put us all out of business, or like telephones, or telex, or... I mean, we had a ton of technological changes between 1940, 1980, especially in manufacturing. And while it did create job loss, we don't associate it with, like, upending what it means to have the economy. I mean, I think now it's just a very good bad guy that is a really good distractor for what is actually going on.
20:43 Robin Rauzi? We think that we're much better at seeing the future than we are, just in general. So, as you know, as I say over and over again, I worked in newspapers, actual print-on-ink newspapers. So, when I first started my career, I remember being in the downtown office, and I was meeting with a guy who was a news editor. And the news editors chose the most important stories to put on the front page or the front of the section, and they designed the page. And on one of these guys' desks was this brochure about the innovative newspaper designs of the future. So, this must have been, like, from 1991? And it talks about how we were all going to get our newspaper
21:28 Robin Rauzi? delivered to our homes in the future, and it wouldn't be printed on newspaper, and the efficiency would be, it would come by fax machine.
21:37 Speaker 02 Yes.
21:40 Robin Rauzi? And, you know, we just don't know how the technology will actually get used. We don't know where the transformation is going to come from. And we're the intersection of the other economic forces, in the case of newspapers, the consolidation of retailers, Craigslist, the implosion of the advertising market as a result of all these things. You know, like, those forces are what led to the change, in the technological change that has began upending journalism in the early 90s that has led us kind of to where we are now. It wasn't fax machines.
22:12 Speaker 02 Fax machine, the fax machine is coming. The fax machine is just, I mean, like, God, of, like, weird things produced in history. I mean, where did all the, I mean, just think-
22:21 Robin Rauzi? And we're still, no, don't you still have to, like, sometimes fax something, usually to a government office?
22:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, thanks, government. Let's increase some budgets so you don't have to use fax anymore. Yeah, I mean, like, people pick bad guys and they pick boogeymen, and they're not always right. So you pointed out that I was like, that I had like a little bit of an inconsistency there, but I think for me, where it's consistent is that AI is overblown and it is a boogeyman, but at the same time, like, it will destroy jobs. But both of those things can be true. And what makes it scary is the effect of displacement, which is what economists call layoffs and firm closures. Job loss that is through no fault of your own, that's displacement.
23:07 Speaker 02 And that displacement is scary no matter where it comes from. I think for me, they can both be true, both that it is a narrative fall guy in the economy that's a get out of jail free card for all the horrible ways that workers have been treated over the past 45 years, while at the same time, the risk that it does have is also mismanaged. Like, they're the same side, different side of the same problem. We don't treat workers well in our economy. AI gives us five different ways to see it, both in how it's overblown and what it'll actually do, which means it's ultimately like, it's just not that interesting.
23:40 Robin Rauzi? I know, there's so many stories about it, and I feel like they, I mean, Silicon Valley has obviously great, great hype men.
23:47 Speaker 02 Amazing.
23:47 Robin Rauzi? But the Wall Street Journal piece, which is another one of these that we, is the one that struck me as closest to the truth of the situation, which is that- Ninety nine point eight percent of companies aren't really ready to do anything with AI anyway, or it's not relevant to what they, it may not be relevant to what they do, or it's so far away, they're not going to have the data to do something with it, that, you know, if you're in one of those industries, maybe it's computer programming, I noticed that editor was pretty high on that list of tasks. But I will say, I've used ChatGPT as a proofreader, and I find it infuriating. Yes, it does find some things, but it's like so tedious to make it do that.
24:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, and it will get better, but it won't fundamentally change our economy. And the, this is a very simple economic argument. Technology increases productivity, productivity increases the size of the economy. So what these doomers are saying is that if you make workers more productive from AI, we will need fewer workers. I mean, the biggest problem with that, and the biggest demonstration of why that's not going to happen, is that US workers are always becoming more productive. It's not like we've been sitting in stasis for 20 years and AI is going to be this big jump up. If you look at productivity of the US worker, it's a straight line, right? It's not a staircase. It doesn't have big
25:14 Speaker 02 leaps. It's just, it's kind of always increasing. So the idea that productivity would somehow result in fewer workers is not a function of productivity itself. The only way that we would need fewer workers is if the economy was smaller.
25:30 Robin Rauzi? Well, okay, so but that leads me to the question from that other HBR article, which is, workers aren't getting the benefit of the productivity, and that there's a study in there that they talk about that where it suggests, first of all, that there's sort of two ways to think about technology. One is things that enhance productivity, and one is one that replaces work, or workers. I'm sorry, I'm going to use those interchangeably, which is not right, but.
25:55 Speaker 02 Close enough.
25:56 Robin Rauzi? And then the other is that technology accelerated economic inequality, that knowledge workers gained a huge amount of of power in the labor market, and this pulled ahead, and that it hurt everybody else.
26:10 Speaker 02 I feel like I have to like step back, like let's shrug the shoulders and get ready. I loathe these types of articles. This article was a 10-page navel gaze into two people who are in one school of thought that a lot of people don't think is right anymore. And what, and then they're like, and here's what they think about AI. And I was like, man, this is, this is giving them a lot of airtime for, for basically talking about the evolution of one type of answer to this question on inequality and ignoring the other answer and not correctly getting across what these two opposing camps fundamentally disagree about.
26:53 Speaker 02 There's one camp that says inequality all came down to skill. And this becomes a proxy for education. Who has the skills and education to adapt and adopt technology on the job? So like computers come into the market, the internet comes into the market, automation comes into the market. Can you put this to work in your job and use it to get paid more? That's the skill question, or that's the skill answer. And that's what this article was about, was all about how we think of skills and getting into like really, really deep minutia of like, which are the exact skills and who has them according to what data set and so on. What they didn't talk about in the whole other school of thought is that technology is neutral.
27:36 Speaker 02 What accelerated inequality was the relative power between employers and workers. The first camp assumes that the labor market is perfectly competitive. The second camp assumes that the labor market is not perfectly competitive. And based on those different assumptions, if the labor market is perfectly competitive, the only thing that changed was the technology and therefore it was the demand of the technology in the labor market that led to higher wages. If the labor market is not perfectly competitive, it doesn't matter what the technology was. The technology is neutral. It's the declining bargaining power of workers at the bottom that's reducing their wages. Those are the two schools of thought.
28:21 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
28:23 Speaker 02 Those are the two main schools of thought.
28:25 Robin Rauzi? Okay. The impression I got was that the technology lessened the bargaining power of those at the bottom.
28:31 Speaker 02 No. No, I mean, no, that's not what I got from the piece. What I got from the piece was it was that technology made workers less valuable at the bottom.
28:43 Robin Rauzi? That's a difference.
28:44 Speaker 02 There's no reason why if you work in retail trade and you're a checkout clerk and you went from using an actual, you know, like, what are they called? The till? Like the cha-ching? Like the big guy?
28:56 Robin Rauzi? A cash register?
28:57 Speaker 02 A cash register, that's it. That you went from using a cash register to an iPad when you check someone out, that your wages need to be frozen for 45 years. No, there's nothing about you working a cash register and being in a retail job that has terrible regulation, that has terrible workplace protections, that is very much influenced by a minimum wage, that is dead in the water. Like, do you think a retail clerk that is at a department store in 1980 using a cash register versus a retail clerk that is at, you know, a J. Crew in, or maybe the Gap, let's use the Gap, two workers at the Gap, one in 1980, one in
29:39 Speaker 02 2025, one of them is using a cash register, one of them is using an iPad. Do you think technology is the reason why the worker in 2025 makes awful wages? That is really the question here. I mean, yes, it's possible that technology has affected, you know, their wages over time, but I think it's it's less to do with who was able to adopt technology onto the job to make them higher skilled. She has low wages because she's in an unorganized sector.
30:11 Robin Rauzi? Okay.
30:12 Speaker 02 For me, this is like a very optimistic telling because all of those aspects of worker power can be changed by policy to put in more protection. And even if you think I'm wrong, like even if you're like, she does not know what she's talking about, AI is going to change everything. My husband does work in AI, so I can go check with him afterwards if he agrees, if he agrees with my ho-hum-ness about the technology. But my perspective as an economist is that technology is neutral and you only blame technology as a harbinger of bad things to come because of your economic conditions and not the technology itself. And we've had lots of technological progress over time, over history, from 1800 to now.
30:54 Speaker 02 And to go back to the HBR article, what they're basically saying is, you know, since around 1980, the distribution of skills and the way technology demanded skills led to really big inequality, right? Basically, the bottom half being left behind. The opposing camp, which that article did not give any space to, but one that I find myself in, is that the labor market isn't competitive and it's not well-regulated. And that led to big inequality and the bottom half being left behind. And so that you have these two ways of looking at the lack of economic progress and prosperity for almost half of Americans. Now, like most things, there's probably truth to both because they can both be true. They
31:38 Speaker 02 can both be acting, you know, in our economy. But I think the problem with saying the first one is that it's, it like robs us of power, right? Like it's technology and technology alone that defeats us versus, you know, it's our choices and who we have chosen to protect and value in the economy.
31:57 Robin Rauzi? Right.
31:58 Speaker 02 Even if you think everything I just said is absolutely wrong because I don't understand the technology, which believe me, a lot of bros will write.
32:05 Robin Rauzi? They like to tell you that.
32:06 Speaker 02 They will write and tell me how little I know about AI. Even if you think that, like, why wouldn't you just take a chance on making workers more protected anyway? Like, from your case, there's nothing, there's not really anything to lose of like, well, maybe we should have a better unemployment system. It's not going to change those people's lives because AI is going to ruin the bottom half of workers. Fine, give them a little bit of protection. See if I'm wrong. We haven't done it in 45 years. Maybe just try something new.
32:34 Robin Rauzi? Mix it up.
32:35 Speaker 02 Optimist economy. Try something new. Let's pay workers. Give it a shot. Like, I, I do want to, I do want to see optimist economy translated into horrible PSAs of like, hey, workers don't have to make poverty wages. Think about it. You know who deserves health insurance? All of us.
32:56 Robin Rauzi? You do.
33:02 Speaker 02 But it kind of goes back to this underlying argument that is there through so much of economic discussion that there's some type of like, dance with the devil, price we have to pay of like, well, we can't have a strong economy in the world unless we don't have a minimum wage. And there's this belief that we can't have nice things.
33:21 Robin Rauzi? Right.
33:21 Speaker 02 And AI is a perfect example of this, of like, well, if we want to be a leader on AI, we've got to make sure that the minimum wage stays 725 and there's no unemployment benefits, otherwise we'll be left behind. And I think you just have to reject that outright.
33:34 Robin Rauzi? And I know you've talked about this before, too, or the alternate view, which is AI is going to do everything for us. It's going to run our labs. It's going to cook our food. It's going to, and we're all going to need a universal basic income that's somehow going to be generated by the wealth that AI is going to absorb out of our economy.
33:55 Speaker 02 I mean, here's a thought, you like, don't listen to a computer programmer's idea on social policy, tax his capital gains, and use that to fund social programs like childcare and universal school meals. Like, I mean, I've written columns that are purely subtweeting Sam Altman and how little he understands about public policy. And honestly, there's some of the ones I'm most proud of, of like, ya boy, you invented cash welfare. No, cash welfare has been around for a long time. You did a five-year case study to prove that it's okay to give money to poor people. I don't want to burst your bubble, but we actually have given money to poor people and nothing new is in your study. You're
34:39 Speaker 02 just using like, hey, it's like watching a caveman discover fire when you have a lighter in your pocket. Like, he's like, hey, Y Combinator is going to go out and do a universal basic income study and like, talk about how like, AI is going to generate all this poverty and so we're going to solve it with UBI. So here's a five-year case study. Y'all, that money didn't go to everybody.
35:00 Robin Rauzi? No, it went to poor people.
35:01 Speaker 02 They had a five-year quote unquote, universal basic income study where they gave money to poor people. They just spent an incredible amount of of money to prove to you it's okay to give cash to poor people while they're saying I'm going to destroy the economy and give everyone a universal basic income if they if they want to test a universal basic income they need to give cash at the front door of country clubs and say like here's $500 before you go play your round of 18 golf at this course that costs $2,500 a play they didn't do that they've never tested UBI nobody has they've tested cash welfare they've dressed it up as something else and they patted themselves on the back about how they're going to save humanity absolutely not I'm holding the lighter you're putting sticks
35:43 Speaker 02 together and rubbing fire and I'm telling you we don't need to do what you're doing got it right here man it's right here we could just give money to social programs I don't need to do your whole fucking thing first and in fact it would be a lot easier if I took the sticks away from you for tax purposes I yeah I mean you're hitting on something which is that I don't really love the great man like the great technology man savior that's gonna come in and I I mean
36:13 Robin Rauzi? yeah and talk about a heel turn I mean you know the number of of tech bros who you've seen start out with this sort of utopian and one after the other after the other has become let's just say their ideas have evolved evolved might be the wrong word changed
36:31 Speaker 02 yeah you get these like hyper wealthy beyond belief people pushing out through PR campaigns about how AI is going to do this or this and I'm like listen I am not going to be distracted my eye is on the ball you run dangerous warehouses and then use money to send yourself into space you are not fooling me about how AI is going to change the economy what changes the economy is what happens at the bottom not what happens at the top you're useless let's protect workers
37:02 Robin Rauzi? Well, you are far more optimistic about AI than, I mean, you've made me more optimistic, actually, or less. My fear of AI disrupting my personal job, it's not actually that I think it will do it well. I think that people may think it does it well. I mean, you know, I know a lot of people who are technical writers, who absolutely their jobs kind of went away. I know a lot of people who are, who used to print newspapers for a living too.
37:31 Speaker 02 But, and then jobs go away. I mean, it's, I don't, I don't mean it to sound callous, but jobs go away. They do. We don't, just like businesses go away. I mean, you know, the other thing that's kind of crazy about 1980? Almost none of those businesses are around anymore. Because most businesses start and then stop. And lots of jobs and occupations will go away. We're always moving forward and that doesn't, that's not casualty or consequence free. The mistake we make is not being kinder through our economic policy to the people whose jobs are gone. Like, there was never this much conversation about typist. I'll say that. Typist erased from our economy. We don't have typist anymore. We don't have secretarial colleges anymore.
38:15 Speaker 02 And part of what really bugs me about the AI conversation is how much of it is gender coded.
38:22 Robin Rauzi? There are other fears related to AI that are not jobs fears, but that are kind of all get masked into a big, you know, fear ball, which we've talked about, about the economic insecurity that people feel. And, you know, there are other things to maybe worry about AI in terms of misinformation, in terms of data collection and privacy.
38:41 Speaker 02 Yes, all of those are legitimate.
38:43 Robin Rauzi? Those are separate things, but they are very hard, I think, for, for humans to separate out from the fear about the immediate job loss that they could be facing.
38:54 Speaker 02 Yes, but I will say that, yeah, AI is not ethical. It's not not racist. It's got massive bias problems, massive invasion of privacy problems. Again, those are all fixable if you had a Congress that was capable of constructing guardrails. But those, again, but those don't spell we won't have an economy or half people won't have jobs. I mean, there's lots of things that are scary about AI on that dimension. But it's not, again, like, that doesn't spell an economic doomerism, and those problems are solvable. We can put in privacy laws. We can put in, you're not allowed to surveil your workers using AI laws. But actually, I think that if you surveil your workers, you should have to give it over to the wage and hour division, and then they can then
39:37 Speaker 02 use that surveillance to fine you for not paying them or giving them the right safety equipment. So that, like, any surveillance you have over your workers, you have to give over to regulators to enforce labor law, I bet you none of them would do it.
39:52 Speaker 02 Like, no, no, no, no, no. You, you want to watch your worker drive and then pee in a bucket? That's fine. You need to turn it over to the wage and hour division and occupational safety and health. And if we find there's any violations on your surveillance, you get fined double. You know, I mean, I'm not, not all my policy is vindictive, but some of it sure is.
40:11 Speaker 02 But you know what? That's why I'm optimistic, because I can creatively punish people doing bad things.
40:19 Robin Rauzi? I think that that leads us right into our closing, uh, segment.
40:23 Speaker 02 Executive orders.
40:24 Robin Rauzi? Executive orders.
40:25 Speaker 02 Okay. My executive order would be, if you air a sport, you have to have 50/50 airtime between men and women's sports.
40:35 Robin Rauzi? Oh, I like that.
40:36 Speaker 02 I mean, the number of times I have turned on, like, ESPN or TNT or something, and they're on their, like, seventh hour of covering one basketball game while there's, like, seven women's games happening in real time. And I'm like, please, can't I watch women play? Actually, very, very apropos to my shirt, which is, uh, all about women's sports. But yes, I do think that you should just, you have to play women and men's sports same amount of time.
41:08 Robin Rauzi? You know, that reminded me of my extremely unpopular executive order. No sports scholarships to colleges.
41:17 Speaker 02 Oh, you're a little, you are a little radical.
41:21 Robin Rauzi? I do not think that throwing a ball or hitting it with a tennis racket or whatever you do should be the way we spend money on higher education or allocate it to people who want to study. I think that that's nuts. I've always thought it's nuts. And if you want to play sports, I have nothing against sports, but I think it needs to be completely untethered from higher education.
41:45 Speaker 02 Oh, interesting. Okay, I'm for, we're going to disagree on our executive orders.
41:49 Robin Rauzi? Oh, my God.
41:50 Speaker 02 I, I'm so sorry. This is, this is the velvet divorce between the Rousey and Edwards Republics. We are basically Czechoslovakia becoming the Czech Republic and Slovakia, but that's okay. We're still friends, but in-
42:03 Robin Rauzi? I get Prague.
42:04 Speaker 02 Sorry, why, sorry, why do you think you get Prague? You know, I lived in Prague. Shouldn't I get Prague?
42:11 Robin Rauzi? Hmm.
42:12 Speaker 02 Okay. I'm fine with having sports relate, I mean, this is such a Texas thing. I'm like, no, you can't take sports out of my school. But I do think athletes need to be paid wages. This name, name, image and likeness is a great start, but no, they need wages, they need health insurance, they need retirement, they need to be paid as employees, treated as employees, and they need to follow employee law. And I think that we should have an extension of child labor law that applies to student athletes.
42:44 Robin Rauzi? If you're going to do it, yeah, you should have to pay them. And I'm from Ohio, big, also sports college town. I went to a certain large university here in Los Angeles, USC, known for a lot of athletes and scandals related to athletic recruiting.
43:01 Speaker 02 Sure.
43:02 Robin Rauzi? So-
43:03 Speaker 02 Texas, I mean, like, game, game, recognize game.
43:08 Robin Rauzi? But different takeaways.
43:09 Speaker 02 Different, different takeaways.
43:10 Robin Rauzi? Okay, we can do a whole, whole episode on that in the future.
43:14 Speaker 02 Maybe this is like a classic economist take where I'm like, you know what the, you know what one answer would be?
43:18 Robin Rauzi? They need, they need benefits and higher pay.
43:20 Speaker 02 They need benefits and pay. You would treat them a lot different if you had to treat them as employees. I mean, can you imagine if you had to treat athletes with workplace compensation laws?
43:29 Robin Rauzi? I know.
43:29 Speaker 02 That would totally change how they train.
43:32 Robin Rauzi? Well, and start with the NFL.
43:33 Speaker 02 Yeah. That's, that's like a whole, that, that one I'm not going to be optimistic about. But, but those are our executive orders. This was, we wanted this conversation today to be.
43:43 Robin Rauzi? To be short.
43:45 Robin Rauzi? And it was not.
43:47 Speaker 02 We wanted it to be kind of this, it's still about the economy and optimism and the stories we tell, but not just one story, I think is this one, but.
44:00 Robin Rauzi? Yeah.
44:00 Speaker 02 We are, as ever, thankful for the, your time that you give to Optimist Economy and to our conversations. And at this part of the show, we would of course like to thank our spiritual sponsors who make this show possible, even if it does not include some type of financial gain for us from this show, which is in fact closer to a money pit.
44:24 Robin Rauzi? It is.
44:25 Speaker 02 It's a money pit I'm really loving. So I have to thank spiritual sponsors. And my spiritual sponsor for the week is a really good breakfast taco. Cause like when they hit, they hit. And I was just in Austin and I had breakfast tacos for basically every meal. And I have no regrets.
44:47 Robin Rauzi? My spiritual sponsor this week is used bookstores. I mean, I love all bookstores, who doesn't? But particularly I like the curated version of used bookstores. And I'm going to give a shout out to here in Los Angeles to Alias Books, which has a very like clean, very modern aesthetic and some very high-end art books. And it's, you know, lovely. And it's complete opposite in Spokane, Washington, Giant Nerd Books, which is like a combination of comic books and sci-fi and whatever weird stuff the owner found interesting.
45:25 Speaker 02 Oh, in that case, I-
45:26 Robin Rauzi? It's a wild place.
45:28 Speaker 02 In that case, I need to shout out Half Price Books. In Austin, there's one particular location where I spent probably half of my money in college, if not, if not more. Half Price Books, exactly as it sounds, so good.
45:45 Robin Rauzi? Thank you so much. This has been The Optimist Economy. Be sure to email us your questions or send us your worries at [email protected] .
45:55 Speaker 02 And of course, we'd like to give snaps to our producer, Sophie, who will fix all this and make us sound so pretty.
46:02 Robin Rauzi? Fix it in post.
46:03 Speaker 02 Fix it in post. Thanks, Sophie.
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