The Economics of Work with Ben Zweig23 Syys

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 three theories of the declining labor share: globalization, technology, and the fall of worker power, and why the US looks different from almost everywhere else
Why monopsony's wage effect is probably 5 to 10 percent below competitive wages, not the 30 to 50 percent implied by some elasticity estimates
Why the more important story may be rent attribution: who captures firm profits when competition declines, and why that share has shifted toward capital
What unions are for, which of their functions are worth preserving, and why the answer depends heavily on what you think the underlying structure of the economy actually is
Sectoral bargaining in Germany and Scandinavia, why those systems are more resilient than US-style firm-level organizing, and the Swedish mine case that shows what happens when AI reclassifies a job mid-negotiation
Why what workers get from work can't be reduced to wages, and why the human dimensions of jobs remain the most underestimated piece of the puzzle

About Anna Stansbury: Anna Stansbury is an assistant professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and a faculty research fellow at the NBER. Her research focuses on labor markets, worker power, and the macroeconomics of wages and inequality. She is co-author, with Lawrence Summers, of influential work on the role of worker power in explaining the declining labor share of income.

Follow Anna on Twitter/X: https://x.com/annastansbury

Follow Ben on LinkedIn

Visit our website for more information

Get in touch with us at info@reveliolabs.com

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(23)

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 commenta...

7 Loka 43min

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,...

30 Syys 1h

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...

16 Syys 52min

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 caug...

9 Syys 48min

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 Marinesc...

2 Syys 51min

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 e...

26 Elo 57min

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 ...

19 Elo 37min