The Economics of Work with Ben Zweig23 Sep

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

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