AI vs Jobs

Kathryn: You know how you're a good podcaster when your production gives you a note like “stop talking.” That’s how you know you nailed this.
Kathryn: Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I’m Kathryn Anne Edwards, economist.
Robin: I’m editor Robin Rauzi.
Kathryn: 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. This episode, we will be talking about how AI is going to steal all of our jobs, and we should feel optimistic about it.
Robin: You wrote that? OK.
Kathryn: I did.
Robin: A couple of announcements. I just realized that when this episode airs, it will be the one-year anniversary of the beginning of Optimist Economy. So happy anniversary to us.
Kathryn: Happy anniversary. I didn’t get you anything.
Robin: Well, technically you still have two weeks.
Kathryn: I probably still won’t.
Robin: OK, that’s fine. I also want to thank people who moved their contributions over to optimisteconomy.com. We added a $40-a-month level, which I was calling spiritual sponsor. And now people think it’s confusing because we have spiritual sponsors who are non-monetary sponsors on the show. So we are open to new names for the high-level consistent support. Finally, I want to thank John Copeland of Bath, Maine, and one other anonymous organic farmer in Oregon, who both joined us at that level.
Kathryn: Just spitballing this —could be “unhinged supporter” —to people who are like, endorsed as being unhinged. “Assault on the medium” supporters. Anything that y’all love, or just “leisure consumer,” “utility maximizer” …
Robin: Yeah. Utility maximizer. There you go.
Kathryn: “Dissaver.” “Dissaving supporter.”
Robin: We’ll come up with something really good here. I’m writing down “dissaver,” actually.
Kathryn: It fits because you’re giving us money, but you’re not spending, you’re dissaving. Also we are doing a question and answer episode. You can send your questions to optimist.economy@gmail.com and we will answer some of the questions we receive on the show. We love to get questions, so please send them to us. I’ll try to answer them and see how fast I can do it.
Robin: See how many episodes we can get out of it. OK.
Kathryn: Next up is Retcon —retroactive continuity —where we reflect on and revisit past episodes. I have two retcons. Wait, do you have any?
Robin: No.
Kathryn: OK. So after we recorded the Trump account episode —which was about the 5/30 baby bond, 401 Kid, Trump account in the State of the Union —Trump announced another Trump account called the Trump Savings Plan.
Robin: Thanks for that.
Kathryn: He now has two accounts that he’s named after himself: one for children and one for retirement. So that’s confusing.
Kathryn: I also got a note from someone who said that in the kids episode —which we internally referred to as “Babies Got Bank” —someone asked me what is the asset-based welfare for the middle class that the government pursues, and I don’t think I was clear on this.
Kathryn: When I said that the US needs asset-based welfare, which was an argument made by Sherraden —he pointed out, and I said as well, the US has asset-based welfare for the middle and upper class. That is the tax preference that the US gives to employer-sponsored account contributions. When you contribute to your 401(k), you are not taxed on that contribution. That is welfare —not having to pay income taxes on money that you put in for retirement. And that is something that largely the top half, and really the top 20%, benefits from.
Kathryn: The Trump kid accounts —God, they need another name —are not meant to be tax-preferred contributions. What would make them asset-based welfare for lower-income people is for the government to contribute directly into the account. The welfare for the middle class comes from the tax treatment of contributions. The welfare for the bottom half of the distribution would be for the government to directly contribute to the account. There’s no need to give a tax preference to the bottom half because they often don’t have that high of a tax bill.
Robin: I’m just going to see if I can clarify this. Let’s say your effective tax rate is around 15% for federal taxes, and you are able to save $10,000 in a pre-tax account. That essentially means you’re not paying $1,500 in taxes. So that $1,500 is the asset that Kathryn’s referring to.
Kathryn: Yes. This is welfare for white collar workers—the government puts the thumb on the scale for you to have retirement contributions, and it doesn’t do that at all for people at the bottom. The idea of these Trump kids accounts would be: the asset-based welfare would come not from giving some type of tax preference, but from giving a direct contribution into the account.
Robin: Yeah. OK. You had another?
Kathryn: Yes. The other one: I got a comment on one of the Social Security policies. Take out your notebooks, class, and let’s review. I had a lot I wanted to say. One of the things I pointed out was that people who have different levels of education work have different-length work histories, and by the time they turn 67, it’ll reflect a really different amount of work. I said something like, I think this will be hard because people have interruptions to work and maybe months or years that they spend out.
Kathryn: Well, someone who is equally, if not more, passionate about Social Security than myself said she thinks it would be too complicated and that the system would be very hard to design in a way that would stay fair. I think —she didn’t say this, but the conclusion is —we should just have a more progressive benefit.
Kathryn: Social Security benefits are progressive in that you get a larger benefit relative to your earnings, the lower your earnings are. We call this the replacement rates. She said we should just make the replacement rate formula more progressive, and of course not raise the retirement age. I thought that was a good comment.
Robin: Right. All right. Anything else? Are we on to terms and conditions?
Kathryn: Onto terms and conditions.
Robin: What did you look up?
Kathryn: You know, I didn’t look it up, but I heard it in the context of soccer. “Chippy” is how we describe a soccer game in which it’s pretty physical and there are lots of fouls and a lot of yellow cards and maybe even red cards —a chippy game. I assume it’s British.
Robin: It reminds me of “chuffed.”
Kathryn: What’s chuffed?
Robin: It’s like when you’re kind of pleased with yourself. “I’m dead chuffed to have won.” It’s a British thing. Like, we won a podcasting award and we’re just so chuffed.
Kathryn: Oh, OK. Well, maybe it came up because normally reviews and comments we get from people leave me chuffed, but they’ve been quite chippy. I would think maybe it’s because it’s primary season —it’s a little bit of chippiness in the air these days.
Robin: Yeah. I have a friend who’s very into astrology and numerology. She’ll tell you Mercury is in retrograde all the way through the end of March.
Kathryn: I forget sometimes that you’re on the West Coast and you probably know your sun sign, your moon sign, your star sign, your house rising.
Robin: I don’t, but I know who I can go to for that information.
Kathryn: Yeah. Robin’s got a star woman.
Robin: I got a star woman.
Kathryn: So, a bit chippy. That was mine. What’s yours?
Robin: Libel versus slander. I did look this up today because we got an email from a listener who said, per your comment in one of our last episodes, you would be liable. And I said, no, you’d be sued for libel. Somebody said you don’t get sued for libel for things you say, which is true. But I did look this up because the news media almost always gets sued for libel, not slander. If you make a comment verbally, you can be sued for slander. Libel is usually what happens when you sue a newspaper for something they’ve put in print. And it does seem that if you record a podcast —if it’s something that is permanently recorded —you could still be sued for libel.
Robin: So I feel like the Mercury is in retrograde. That’s why everyone’s chippy.
Kathryn: Mercury is in retrograde. So I’m being libelous. And we just thought, what’s another corner of the internet we can get mad at? Let’s talk about AI again. Anyway, we’re going to take a retrograde break. Come back for the big pilcrow —hope you’re still with us.




Kathryn: And we’re back. Sorry —we got a note that we need to stop laughing and now I can’t —everything is funny. This is like when I was a little kid and my dad would be like, “Stop giggling,” and then we just giggle harder. OK. So we wanted to talk about what’s going to happen when AI takes all our jobs.
Robin: We’ve kind of put this on the list of things we wanted to talk about. And then almost the next day, Jack Dorsey announced that he was laying off 4,000 of the 10,000 employees at Block, which is the financial services company that owns the Square app and the Cash app. And I began —I literally heard people talking about it at dinner in a restaurant the same night. And there’s some real question as to whether the layoffs they were doing were really because they were building an AI future. But it was the kind of thing that just puts the fear of God into the hearts of every white collar worker in America all at once.
Robin: So what I said to Kathryn was: what’s the likelihood of real job retraining? What can we really expect to be done? What could be done in a better economic —in an optimist economy —situation? What would we hope would be provided for people whose jobs are going to be taken by AI, in part because it’s government policy to be all in on AI?
Kathryn: Yeah. Our episode last season about AI was very much me trying to pour a bucket of cold water on what we think AI will do within the next few years, even within the next 10 years, and to really put it in perspective.
Robin: And that was a year ago, and people are still like, “It’s going to change everything tomorrow.” well, you and I have been talking about it for a year, and it’s not like we were on the cutting edge of it.
Kathryn: The upshot of that episode is that it takes a long time for technology to be adopted into firms, used on the job, and actually increase productivity. So even though you have lots of noise and fanfare around AI, the idea that there is a company using it really well and effectively is a bit of a long shot.
Kathryn: Remember that there are 165 million people working in our economy, and you do not have 165 million people seeing AI on the job, especially in a way that makes them either more productive or going to see their job eliminated.
Kathryn: That was the part I was saying: productivity doesn’t shoot up. And if you find that too hard to believe, it’s worth knowing that productivity didn’t show a large jump up with computers, or with the internet. Imagine how much the internet has changed your job. Even that took over a decade to be adopted into the workplace, and probably two until it was reasonably adopted. So it’s very hard to change how people do jobs.
Robin: There was a piece today in the New York Times by a guy who used to work at Block who basically said, firing nine people out of 10 is a good way to force people to use AI.
Kathryn: Yeah. And the other thing is that when a firm says that they are either not hiring, or firing, or making any type of headcount decisions based on AI, you have no reason to believe them. It’s a very convenient fall guy that has almost no way of being validated.
Robin: I don’t even think it’s a fall guy. I think it’s actually deliberate —it’s a message. The guy who wrote that column in Block thinks it’s signaling to Wall Street: “We’re on the cutting edge of AI.” It’s a message to shareholders and stock buyers and investors.
Block’s stock price shot up after that announcement because it made a payment processing firm appear to be an AI-forward firm. Like, you process payments. How much AI do you need?
Kathryn: Yeah. It’s highly manipulable. If the stock market is looking for, “Oh, we’re too concentrated in tech stocks and we need to find places to invest that rely on AI” —don’t just build the AI, we need to diversify —I can make money firing people from the market.
Robin: Yeah. But companies have always made money firing people. That’s been true for decades.
Kathryn: They do, until they don’t. It depends on when and how they do it and what the announcement is. Because at some point, you can see this habit forming in recessions where a bunch of people have done layoffs and then the pressure from shareholders is, “Well, you need to do some layoffs too, because everybody’s cleaning house.” So there’s more peer pressure in corporate decisions than they would probably like to admit.
Kathryn: But I think what this episode is saying —let’s say AI does take white collar jobs. What does that mean? And is there anything we can do about it? Assuming that we can’t stop the job loss, is there something that we can do?
I actually did a closed-door briefing on Capitol Hill to a congressional committee about this. Not a public testimony —a briefing to one side of the house, in a safe space where members have a chance to ask questions.
Robin: That’s even more fancy pants —behind closed doors.
Kathryn: I did one ages ago and just said: assume all these jobs really do go away. You cannot turn back the tide. There’s very little the government can do to make private companies not fire people if they want to.
So you should probably regulate AI so it’s not violating privacy —and also, algorithms are really racist, so maybe look into that. But aside from those problems —which I call “IT problems,” not on labor economists to fix —the point I was making to them was: the scariest thing about AI isn’t necessarily the technology itself, but the idea of your job becoming obsolete and not having any options. Congress can fix that second part.
You can give people options. You can change the way we treat unemployment. We can take the wind out of the spooky sails of AI by giving people a really good outside option from the government.
Robin: We’ve talked about things that we could do to make unemployment insurance better. Do you think there are things specific to the AI job loss —the kind of job loss we might anticipate from AI —that would be different?
Kathryn: So the US deciding to help people who don’t have a job —there are really a few eras of this. One is during the Depression. This was: we are going to do everything we can. The US didn’t have an unemployment system at the time, and so it leaned a lot on public employment service.
Robin: This is like the WPA?
Kathryn: Those were projects within the Public Employment Service, which included the Civilian Conservation Corps and the WPA. And there have been flashes of that since. A big blizzard hit New York City last month and Mamdani has done what a lot of mayors have done, which is public employment: if you come with a shovel, we’re going to give you some money, and then the path gets cleared right away. It’s short-term public temp work.
Kathryn: That was pursued during the Great Depression. And afterwards, lots of people have proposed it as an anti-poverty program, as an economic investment program, something like a manufacturing job loss program. Lots of people have wanted a public jobs guarantee, a public employment service, something like that. But we haven’t really done it to any large degree outside of the Great Depression.
Kathryn: What we have had is unemployment insurance —the current system of unemployment, where if you have lost your job through no fault of your own, your employer has to verify that, you are willing and able to work, and you have worked enough previously. So it’s going to exclude all new job seekers. You are eligible for a benefit that is a portion of your prior wage. And this system has been, if not broken, going to be broken since the seventies. And we’ve never fixed it.
Now it goes to fewer than half of the unemployed. It was meant to replace about half of wages, and it used to. Now it replaces closer to a third or even a fourth. So it’s not a generous program, it doesn’t go to that many people, and it is the only benefit in the US that has a firm time limit. You are eligible for a certain number of weeks and then you’re done.
Robin: And that varies also from state to state.
Kathryn: Yes. Now, the third kind of era: we’ve had a couple of recessions —the Great Recession, the pandemic —where we’ve tried to do something else for the unemployed. In the Great Recession, we extended the length of unemployment, so the benefits weren’t higher, but you could get them for a long time. The pandemic added money to the unemployment benefit that your state gave you. Everyone just got a flat federal add-on to their weekly state benefit, and they created this wraparound unemployment insurance program for people who weren’t eligible for unemployment insurance.
Robin: Like people who are self-employed?
Kathryn: Yeah. It was called PUA —Pandemic Unemployment Assistance —and it was modeled on DUA, Disaster Unemployment Assistance. When a FEMA disaster is declared, people who apply for unemployment because of the disaster are rejected. They get DUA. So it’s a program for unemployment insurance rejectees to still give them some money in the disaster. In hurricanes, they get the state average weekly wage, because they don’t have a good enough earnings history from W-2 employment; they get a function of the state’s average weekly wage. In the pandemic, you were supposed to submit documents of how much you earned. It also had some fraud issues.
So that is how we help people. The only big variation from that is that we had a program called TAA —Trade Adjustment Assistance —that was designed to help workers who lost their job to international trade. What year did TAA start?
Robin: Was this like factory work going overseas? Aimed at manufacturing jobs?
Kathryn: Yes. It just ended —it ended in 2022. But it started in 1962. And it had a resurgence after the free trade agreements of the 1990s. The problem with the program was that in order to benefit, you had to prove that you had lost your job to trade, which was just a really high burden.
Robin: Yeah. There are a million ways that can be really difficult. What was it called?
Kathryn: Trade Adjustment Assistance. The program itself never had that good of funding. And the options for training weren’t great, especially because a lot of times when trade took out a job, it would take out a large employer in a smaller midsize city where TAA training can’t create jobs. I could put 300 people into skilled production training, but that’s not going to create jobs at the end of it. You have to align training with work, and places that are going through a hard time economically don’t necessarily have a lot of work.
Robin: I think a lot about that book “Janesville.” All of those people who lost their job in Janesville, Wisconsin, when an auto manufacturing plant shut down. There were ripple effects to all of that. And the job training that people got —people became prison guards.
Kathryn: Yeah, the jobs weren’t as good.
Robin: The jobs weren’t as good. And even then, a lot of people didn’t make it through the training. They needed jobs. They didn’t have time to do the training. They had to be working. Because if they weren’t making any money, it was better to be making some money than to be trying to do training for a job that wasn’t necessarily going to be as good.
Kathryn: It’s an absolutely heartbreaking book. I have said since the day I finished it that every labor economist in the country needs to read this book. You shouldn’t be allowed to do research on unemployment if you have not read “Janesville.” It’s a GM plant—I think it’s the oldest continuously operating GM plant in the country. And it closes during the Great Recession. And it had been politicized because Obama had made a campaign stop there. The congressman representing Janesville was Paul Ryan, who made a big deal about, “Obama lied to my high school buddies.” And then he has a total heel turn. By the end of the book, he is running for vice president. So he starts the book very invested about what’s going to happen to Janesville and the people who lose their job. And by the end of the book, he’s gone. And if he sounds familiar to Optimist Economy listeners —this is the lunch bag guy who doesn’t think that children who don’t have food should have a lunch, empty paper bag of their souls.
Robin: Anyway, the book is called “Janesville: An American Story,” and it’s by Amy Goldstein.
Kathryn: She was a Washington Post reporter covering the campaign who went back and covered Janesville over three or four years.
Robin: It came out in 2017.
Kathryn: Oh, it’s so good.
Kathryn: But I think we can take a lot of lessons from what has come before. Number one: America doesn’t care that much about unemployed people.
Kathryn: I’ve always thought this is self-preservation —that it’s easier to write off unemployed people as people who were bad at their job, people who didn’t work that hard, people who haven’t looked that hard. Because if someone who works hard, looks hard, and did everything right loses their job, what does that say about you?
Robin: Yeah. That we’re all vulnerable.
Kathryn: That we’re all vulnerable. People are like, “My job is safe because I work hard.” So if someone who works hard loses their job, it absolutely threatens my worldview. And so it’s easier to write off unemployed people as worse than me. Having empathy with the unemployed —it’s just not there.
Robin: If you worked in a newsroom, you learned empathy with the unemployed real quick, because people who were smarter than you lost their jobs all the time.
Kathryn: I think a lot of people have no experience with that, especially the people who feel like their jobs are currently threatened by AI. Part of the desperation comes from: “But I did the right things. I went to college, I got a job in a good sector, I’ve worked for a big employer.” The idea that you could be vulnerable after making the quote-unquote right decisions is very scary.
Robin: Because we judge people in this economy for not making the right decisions, right? We blame them for not investing for retirement. We blame them for not going to college. We blame them for studying art history.
Kathryn: It’s so much easier to judge people for doing something wrong, as opposed to recognizing that the economy can just deal out a really bad hand.
Robin: Well, it’s worth reminding people —what did you say? —2 million people lose their job every month?
Kathryn: Let me get you the FRED data…. Every month for the past three years, layoffs and discharges —which includes people who were fired and people who quit —have averaged around 1.7 million people.
Robin: Every month. We should say what FRED is.
Kathryn: FRED is the Federal Reserve Economic Database, run out of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. FRED is a compendium of all publicly published data. FRED’s been around basically —before there was the internet, there was FRED.
Kathryn: It does have a companion, which is actually a sleeper hit among the data nerd community: ALFRED. FRED is Federal Reserve Economic Data. ALFRED is the Archive Federal Reserve Economic Data. ALFRED has everything —the amount of funding for every line item of government spending going back to the 1930s, meetings of the Federal Reserve. ALFRED is all of the history, and then the current data releases are on FRED. FRED and ALFRED are my besties.
Robin: But back to our AI jobs situation here. So here’s what I’m hearing: We don’t like unemployed people. Our unemployment system is cracked, if not completely broken. We did have a Trade Adjustment Assistance system for 60 years, but it was also not well funded, and it ended in 2022. I’m not seeing anything existing—or even a pattern —that resembles something that would help for a potentially major economic shift, even if it didn’t happen overnight.
Who wrote that essay that said, “We’re in our February 2020 moment”?
Kathryn: Oh, I don’t know.
Robin: I saw it [referenced] in the Wall Street Journal. They were basically saying AI is going to hit us like the pandemic—we have no idea it’s coming. The essay was by an investor named Matt Schumer, and he says it wasn’t meant to go viral and he didn’t mean to scare people.
Kathryn: The one thing I’ll add to your recap: We do have public money for training programs in the US. But those training programs are often limited and tied to work requirements. You often have to be very poor to be eligible for money for training. American Job Centers are a kind of central hub for this. It’s called the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, WIOA. It’s not meant for middle-class people to take advantage of. The idea is that it helps job seekers and aligns them with training, and some of them get funding for it. But it’s not like, “Hey, I lost my job, I’m going to go to an American Job Center and they’re going to line me up with free training.” It doesn’t work that seamlessly. It’s not something we make poor people do to get benefits, but it’s not not that.
Robin: So once we lose all of our jobs to AI, what is the hope?
Kathryn: [Getting a note from production. This is sad.]
Robin: AI has already come for the copy editors. And while I’m not a copy editor, I’m in an industry that’s been shrinking and changing for a long time. I understand that some people can get unpaid work in podcasting—but smart people, agile people, people who can learn a lot and learn quickly—what are they going to do? Bookkeepers, accountants, all sorts of smart, detail-oriented people who’ve been valuable contributors to companies, to their own businesses.
Kathryn: What are they going to do?
Part of the optimism from this has to come from the fact that most people do not look around for jobs that are becoming obsolete. A lot of occupations have completely gone from our economy that used to employ a ton of people. And we didn’t necessarily focus on them. I think in part because a lot of those jobs that were made obsolete were done by women.
Robin: Done by women?
Kathryn: Yeah. Switchboard operators, typists, a lot of classical receptionist jobs —computers used to be women. We have lost occupations before. This is something that happens in our economy: we destroy jobs. That is part of our economic history. So this is not new from that perspective.
Kathryn: People are like, “But these are good jobs. These are white collar jobs. These are jobs that paid well.” Yeah, we lost a lot of really good, high-paying jobs to technology in the past. Just to give you some perspective: in 1979, the peak of manufacturing employment, 19.5 million people were employed in manufacturing —a high-paying blue collar job that had pretty high rates of unionization, healthcare benefits, and retirement benefits. Even as the US economy was growing, over a 30-year period, we lost 8 million manufacturing jobs.
Kathryn: I say this to make the point that the job loss isn’t unique. Obsolescence isn’t unique. Technology taking over what could be something a person could do—all of these things have happened all the time. Is there a way for our economy to deal with it better? I think the answer to that is yes.
Robin: Do you have an idea about what we should be doing?
Kathryn: I have a couple. So, the first thing we need to do is replace our state-level unemployment system. That sucks. I wrote my dissertation on unemployment insurance. It sucks. That is me going from “Kathryn” to “Dr.” Edwards: “The thing sucks.”

So we did a whole episode on unemployment insurance and all the ways we can change it, but short version— if I'm ever capable of saying the short version— the short version is we need a new federal unemployment insurance system that is built for triage. Is built for the notion that unemployment can look really different for a lot of people. And I mean, think about this in the context of AI. Legitimately, you lose your job to AI. What kind of unemployment spell will you have? For some people that spell is going to really short. I mean, they need some cash quickly in order to stay afloat, but they'll find a job in a couple months. Other people, it's a longer process. They're going to have to do some slight changes to their career, but they are able to use their current resume and current situation and find another job. It just might take them longer. 
Some people will have to pivot. All together. And that pivot might look like moving across the country. That pivot might look like starting up their own business or retraining for another career, but they need to pivot. And what a good unemployment system will do is help all three of those workers, not just the ones that can be rapidly absorbed back into the labor market. The government should invest in the pivot that careers need to take sometimes.
This has two sidebar issues that are catastrophically large.
Robin: I was just going to ask if any states do this well.
Kathryn: No, because you really need universal health insurance. One of the things people talk about most with unemployment is how they get their health insurance and how they take care of their physical health. So to make this work, we need really good health insurance. Republicans would hate this because once you get someone on Medicaid, they’re not going to want to get off of it. And why would you? It makes the job search a lot harder if you have to find a job with health insurance.
Kathryn: So that’s problem one. Problem two is that we’d have to restructure how we charge for things like education and student loans. We wouldn’t want to send a 45-year-old back for a four-year bachelor’s degree where they take on a lot of debt.
I think that part’s the easiest problem to solve. If you said, “Hey, there’s a government retraining and education system that is capped at this level of tuition” —four-year universities could offer special degrees. I think colleges and universities would absolutely change their course offerings in order to meet that standard.
An example of this is after World War II. You had the GI Bill that funded a lot of returning service members to go to college. But a lot of them did not want to be there for four years in a traditional degree. So schools offered accelerated programs specifically for GIs so that they could get the degree and go.
Robin: It’s funny —I feel like we have a lot of those things in community colleges now, though I suppose they vary again from state to state and place to place.
Kathryn: Well, they need to, because they should be built around local employers.
One thing we can do is expand apprenticeships, which are really good programs. They require a nationally recognized credential —that’s what makes them so good; they’re selective. But we could expand apprenticeships. It’s a lot of school and a lot of nights. It would be hard to do if you had young kids. But I think with better public programs, we will start to see more apprenticeships. A lot of states have been experimenting with a child care worker apprenticeship or a home healthcare worker apprenticeship. The problem with those two is that apprenticeships cost time and money, and those jobs don’t pay well. But if we had a different system—like a universal childcare system and the jobs were paid at a reasonable rate—the government could reimburse at an apprenticeship level and then we would open up opportunities.
So I think that’s all one aspect of it. It sounds like boiling the ocean, but a lot of the pieces are there. The US is the envy of the world in having the community college system we do. We have lots of opportunities for people to pick up second careers, if they want to.
One of the things that seems particularly scary about this moment is that not only do you not know what’s going to happen to your job, you actually don’t know what the next path will be.
Robin: The next path might also be the next thing to be disrupted. I was just watching this video about manufacturing —they were talking about manufacturing chips. They’re building these big computer chip centers in Arizona, and you look at them and there’s like one guy working and everything else is robots. It’s an amazing system, but it’s not going to bring in a bunch of people to work in that factory.
Kathryn: That is the way manufacturing is going. But there are lots of places where I don’t see that ever happening. I don’t ever see a restaurant —high-service, labor-oriented sectors like restaurants, hotels, entertainment venues —they’re always going to demand a ton of labor. Childcare, education, health will always demand a ton of labor.
A lot of unemployed people in sociological and ethnographic studies will say the same thing: once they realized they weren’t going to get that job back, they just went ahead and moved in different directions —started businesses, moved across the country, did different things.
And I’m sure you know so many second careers from people who were journalists and went on to do other things. Enron hit Houston so hard—the largest, most infamous corporate scandal in US history. Those people lost everything, because at the time there weren’t regulations on retirement contributions, and all of their retirement was tied up in Enron stock, which crashed.
I remember a guy who came to the house—I think he was another soccer parent—who was an Enron layoff who became a full-time carpenter. He came to install something, measured and came back. And my dad asked him about it—because the Enron prosecution was going on by that point—and the guy was like, “Yeah, man, I hope they all burn in hell, but I am happier.” I’ll never forget the casual way he said it. I was just like —he hopes they die in jail, but this has been better for him.
And something like that —as I became a researcher and looked into the unemployed —you do have the Janesvilles of the world where a lot of people go through terrible, terrible times, but there are also “night is darkest before the dawn” type moments where people use it to be creative. We don’t have to fix the labor market for people, because the government would never be able to do that that well. But we can change the structures of our economy in small ways to facilitate and foster people taking advantage of what is a difficult situation.
It’s not going to work for everyone, which is why we have to have other methods and other backup systems. But we basically do nothing. So we can do a lot more. And then there’s the whole other separate part about public employment service again and a job guarantee and things like that.
Robin: And then there’s that.
Kathryn: The whole thing about a public job guarantee —if there’s something conservatives hate, they really hate the idea of more public sector workers. But it is a very popular policy. And in fact, it’s one that was long championed by the Black community. MLK’s budget, which he wrote with Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, came up with a budget to revitalize the Black community and give them the economic opportunities they’d never had. And it included a public jobs guarantee.
Robin: Anything else? Any other optimism for us?
Kathryn: Do you feel optimistic after that, or does it feel like a really big to-do list?
Robin: I was listening to the guy who used to be chief economist for the Treasury Department, on Marketplace. They were talking about the tariffs. But one of the things he said was that one lesson he was taking away from the tariffs was that the US economy did not crash because of them —this was right after the Supreme Court ruling. His point was that the US economy is just really, really big and diverse. It’s a reminder that you know your economy. It’s like —humans experience the weather from about six feet off the ground. That’s the weather to us. But weather is actually happening all the way up to 30,000 feet. The economy is like that too. We feel the economy in our house, but the economy is so much bigger than that. The economy will survive AI.
Kathryn: It will. And the position of public policy should be: what can we do to facilitate the transition to whatever comes next?
Kathryn: What is your AI-induced pivot to your next career? What would you do?
Robin: Ooh.
Kathryn: Mine is a bookstore. I’m guilty.
Robin: I see. This is just because you wanted to say “run a bookstore.”
Kathryn: My best friend has a PhD in biology —she’s an absolutely fantastic creature. She and I would always talk about our post-PhD career. Mine is: librarian, run a bookstore, run a coffee-shop bookstore.
Robin: Coffee during the day, wine bar at night.
Kathryn: Yes, please. Or a gardening service —help people with their gardening and landscaping. I would love to just work on people’s gardens all day.
Robin: You can come to my yard any time. What’s yours?
Robin: Oh, so I have been thinking about this. I told my wife the other day that what I want is a yoga co-op. I want to run a yoga co-op.
Kathryn: If you’re legitimately terrified about losing your job to AI, I think part of where that fear can come from is just the total lack of support we have for unemployed people. That is a choice. We can choose differently. We can absolutely build a great unemployment system that helps people through this transition, that looks very different, that has very different outcomes, and will filter people to all kinds of directions. But it starts with sympathy for the unemployed.
Robin: All right, we’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be right back.
Kathryn: OK, we’re back. We all have jobs.
Robin: And it’s time for executive orders, where we get to dictate some big change that we would like to see happen in an undemocratic fashion. What’s your executive order, Kathryn?
Kathryn: Optimist Economy has a word ban list of things that we don’t let people say anymore. We don’t let them say “red state,” “blue state.” Recently we’ve added “common sense” and “the American people” coming from politicians. There’s a whole compendium of things you’re not allowed to say to pregnant people. I’m going to add to the word ban list today: “electable.” Not allowed to say “electable” anymore.
Robin: I like that. For a lot of good reasons.
Kathryn: Well, if I ever got a reply from anyone who wasn’t a woman, maybe I would feel differently. But yeah, we’re not allowed to say “electable” anymore.
Kathryn: Let me just quickly say —I need to get this off my chest: the thing that gets me about “electability” —let’s just vote for the people who stand up for what you believe in.
Robin: Yeah.
Kathryn: Anyway, I’m going to go screaming into a paper bag. I’ll be right back.
Robin: Mine —assuming that the Epstein files will be in the news forever, because it certainly feels that way —no more pictures of Epstein, or Maxwell, on vacation in France or at parties in New York. I don’t think people realize this continuing glamorization of these sex traffickers and pedophiles, just because we’ve decided that everything that goes online needs a photograph. Find something else. We do not need to ever see smirking pictures of Jeffrey Epstein again.
Kathryn: What’s your spiritual sponsor?
Kathryn: Spiritual sponsors. My spiritual sponsors are small, independent bookstores. I have many that I deeply love. I think the best way to explore a city is to find whatever independent bookstore they have. It’s typically in a fun neighborhood, typically in a walkable area, and it’s always a great way to get to know a locality by going to their local bookstore.
Robin: I’m going to shout out Sofi’s spiritual sponsor. It’s Lent as we’re recording this right now, which is the period between Ash Wednesday and Easter when people often give things up as a sacrifice. Anyway, there’s a guy on TikTok who’s a Catholic dad who’s doing one really, really cringeworthy thing on TikTok every day for Lent —to learn humility, I don’t know. He’s very funny.
Robin: My spiritual sponsor, because it’s this time of year, is backyard avocados. We’ve got eight of them on our counter right now. Makes everything good.
Kathryn: Y’all. I just want to do a quick aside: Robin and I were doing a planning call and I was trying to make lunch and she heard me yell to my husband, “Wait, did you take the last avocado?” And she’s like, “Not in this house.” She had avocados for days. That was Robin’s response to my crisis about the last avocado I was going to put in my lunch.
Robin: Not a problem here. Not right now.
Kathryn: I can’t ever be accused of being an avocado-toast millennial —I just like to eat them directly on a tortilla chip.
Robin: We put them on everything. Chop them up. Put them in your soup. Put them on your salad. Put them with your eggs.
Kathryn: This is like when pizza’s on a bagel: you can have pizza any time. Well, now that I’m singing, we should probably —
Robin: We should wrap this up.
Kathryn: If we were being broadcast, this is the point where we’d be kicked off the air.
Robin: Yeah. We’re not even public access cable at this point.
Kathryn: The Optimist Economy Podcast is edited by Sofi LaLonde. Our video production for social media is by Andy Robinson. Let’s keep those two in paychecks. If you have the means, please contribute at optimisteconomy.com. We will also sell you a shirt, a hat, a tote bag. Video clips from our show are on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. You should definitely send them to people who you think should be listening, or who love making nasty comments. If you’re on Substack, you can follow us there too. Join the Optimist Chat to talk with fellow optimists—we’re eavesdropping, both of us, and we try to chime in.
Kathryn: Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Rate us on Apple Podcasts. We’re giving you a lot to do, listeners, but in the meantime, we love you and we couldn’t do this without you, and we do this for you. So we hope you enjoyed it.