The Economics of Work with Ben Zweig
Work is changing, and the forces shaping it are endlessly fascinating. In The Economics of Work, Ben Zweig sits down with leading economists, researchers, and thinkers to explore the ideas that define how we work, why we work, and what the future of work could look like. Each conversation dives deep into the literature, economic theory, and the philosophical questions that underlie the world of labor.
Episodes
Natalia Emanuel - What We Lose When We Stop Working in the Same Room
When two people have a conversation in person, their brains synchronize. Over Zoom, they lose 90% of that neural synchrony. That's the starting point for understanding what remote work has actually cost us.Topics covered:Why in-person work drives creativityHow remote work reduced written code feedback by 20% even between people on the same campusWhy remote work hurts junior workers twice: separate
Ernie Tedeschi - What the Productivity Numbers Say About AI
Productivity growth in the US has jumped by about a percentage point since 2023. That's a big deal. Whether AI is the cause, or just the context, is a much harder question to answer than most commentary assumes.Topics covered:Why labor productivity and total factor productivity are telling completely different stories right nowWhy quality-adjusting a data center over months is nearly as hard as co
Mike Spence - What a Nobel Laureate Thinks AI Does to Education
The theory of labor market signaling changed how economists think about education, hiring, and information. Fifty years later, AI is rewriting the conditions that made the theory work.In this episode, Ben sits down with Mike Spence, Nobel laureate and former dean at both Harvard and Stanford, to explore what AI means for signaling, growth, education, and the structure of markets.Topics covered:The
Anna Stansbury - 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.Topics covered:The thr
Paul Osterman - The Disposable Worker: How Firms Learned to Stop Investing in People
The unspoken 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.Topics covered:Contractors, freelancers, and marginal workers: the three categories of disposable workWhy using staffing firms drive
David Deming - 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 educ
Ioana Marinescu - 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.Topics covered:What a perfect
Roberto Rigobon - 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.Topics covered:Why survey response
Deena Mousa - 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.Topic
Luis Garicano - 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 seri
Ronnie Chatterji - How The Labor Market Looks From Inside Open AI
What does it look like to do economics from inside the AI revolution with access to data nobody else has, and questions nobody has figured out how to answer yet?In this episode, Ben sits down with Ronnie Chatterji, chief economist at OpenAI, to pull back the curtain on how economic research gets done at a frontier AI lab.Topics covered:Why the right time horizon for AI economics is a mix of real-t
Bill Easterly - What We Get Wrong About Foreign Aid
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 view
Isabella Loaiza - Beyond Exposure
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 big
Jasmine Sun - The Youth's Love/Hate Relationship with AI
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 hostility
Leah Boustan - What Immigration Tells Us About Economic Opportunity
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 gener
John Boudreau - Are Business Leaders Listening to HR Theory?
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 ass
Dan Hamermesh - Time, Beauty, and What Economics Gets Wrong About Work
Keynes predicted we'd be working 15-hour weeks by now. So what went wrong? Does it even matter?In this episode, Ben sits down with Dan Hamermesh, one of the most prolific and wide-ranging labor economists of the past half century, to explore questions the field rarely asks: Why do Americans work more than anyone else in the rich world? What do we actually do with leisure when we get it?Topics cove
Rachel Lipson - Bridging Business, Education, and Policy to Build a Better Workforce
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 to
Daniel Rock - What Automation Means for How We Organize Jobs
What 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" measuresWhy tasks are "assemblages," not atoms, and what that means for how we think about job changeThe task chaining
Alexis Fink - The Science of Making Work Not Suck
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 get
Nick Bloom - The New Geography of Work
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 futu
Al Roth - Moral Economics and Repugnant Transactions
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 Ec
David Autor - How Technology Affects Work
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 adoptionThe "expertise framework": how the same automation can be a force multiplier for one worker and a threat to another, dep
The Economics of Work - Trailer
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