If AI Gets Hired, America Can Handle It

Um, that's that you know.

“Hello, and welcome to Autonomous Economy of Katharine and Edwards Economist.”

I'm editor Robin Rousy. On this show we believe the US economy could be better and we talked about how to get there one problem in solution at a time. This episode we will be talking about how AI is going to steal all of our jobs. You wish you feel optimistic about it.

You wrote that. I know. Okay.

A couple of announcements. I just realized that when this episode airs it will be the one your

anniversary of the beginning of Optimistic Economy. So happy anniversary to us. Have you anniversary? I didn't get you anything. Well, technically, you still have two weeks. I'm probably still wrong. It's probably still wrong. Yeah, that's right. I also want to thank people who moved their contributions over to Optimistic Economy.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-monitorious sponsors on the show.

So we are open to new names for the high level consistent support and finally I want to thank

John Copeland of Bathmain and one other anonymous organic farmer in Oregon who both joined us at

“that level. I think a great level just like spitballing this could be an unhinged supporter.”

Who are like endorses being unhinged as salt on the medium supporters? I mean anything that y'all love or just leisure consumer. That's a good one. Utility maximizer. Yeah, Utility maximizer. Oh yeah, dissaver, dissaver. Welcome up with something really good here. I'm writing down dissaver actually. Dissaver is not, is dissaver a fit because you're given us money but you're not spending

you're dis saving. Okay, we are doing a question and answer episode and you can send your questions to [email protected] and we will answer some of the questions we receive on the show. We love to get questions. So please send them to us and then I'll try to answer them and see how fast I can do it. See how many episodes we can get out of it. Okay,

“next up is retcon, retroactive continuity. Yep, where we reflect in fixed past episodes. So I have”

two retcon ways do you have any? No. Okay. Okay, so here's my. So after we recorded the Trump account episode, which was about that was like 530 a baby bond for a one-kid Trump account. In the state of the union, Trump announced another Trump account called Trump savings plan. You know, has two accounts that he's named after himself, one for children and one for retirement. So that's confusing. I also got a note from someone who said that in the kids episode,

which we internally referred to as baby's 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. So when I said that the US needs asset-based welfare, which was an argument made by Sheridan, 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 accounts contributions.

So 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% is who benefits from that. The Trump kid accounts, God they need another name, but the kid accounts, it's not meant to be tax preferred contributions. What would make it asset-based welfare for the lower income is

for the government to contribute directly into the account. So the welfare for the middle class comes from the tax treatment of contributions, the welfare for the bottom half the distribution, the lower class 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. I'm just going to see if I can clarify this, but 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. Right. So that $1,500 is the asset that that Catherine's referring to. Yes. This is welfare for white collar workers that the government

Trump kids accounts would be the asset-based welfare would come from not giving some type of tax

preference, but in giving a direct contribution into the account. Yeah. Okay. You had another one. Yes. The other one was I got a comment on one of the social security policies which like take out your notebooks class and let's review. I had a lot of one 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 or reflect a really different amount of work. I kind of said like

“I think this will be hard because people have interruptions to work and they have you know maybe”

months or years that they spend out. Well someone who is equally, if not more passionate about

social security than myself, she said that she thinks it would be too complicated. And that the

system would be very hard to design in a way that would stay fair. And so I think she didn't say this, but the conclusion is we should just have a more progressive benefit. So social security benefits are progressive in that you get a larger benefit relative to your earnings, the lower your earnings are. And we call this the replacement rate. So she said we should just make the replacement rate formula more progressive. And of course not rate the retirement age. So I thought that was a good

comment. Right. Anything else? We're on to terms and conditions. On to terms and conditions. Okay. Terms and conditions. What did you look up? You know I didn't look it up, but I heard it it's in the context of soccer, Chippy. Yeah. Is it 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 in the red cards, a Chippy game. Is that a Britishism? I don't know. It reminds me of chuffed. I get what's

chuffed. What's chuffed? It's like when you're kind of pleased with yourself. I'm dead chuffed to have one. It's a dead chuffed. Yeah, it's a it's a British line anyway. Chuffed. Okay. It's just yeah, like we want a podcasting award and we're just so chuffed. Oh. Okay. Well maybe it came up because normally reviews and comments we get from people leave me chuffed. Yes. But they've been quite chippy.

“And I think maybe it's because it's primary season. It's a little bit of chiffiness in the air”

these days. Yeah. So yeah, I have for friend who's very into astrologian numerology. She'll tell you Mercury and retrograde all the way through the end of March. I forget that you're on the West Coast and you probably all like your son's son, your moon's son, your star's son, your house rising. I don't, but I know who I can go to for that information. Robin's, Robin's got a star guy. Here's a star woman, but you have a bit chippy. That was mine. What's yours?

Liable 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 about you would be liable then I said, "No, you'd be sued for liable." Somebody said, "You don't get sued for liable for things you say,

which is true." But I did look this up because I thought, I feel like the news media almost always

get sued for liable not slander. Like if you make a comment verbally, you can be sued for slander. Liable is usually what happens when you sue a newspaper for something they put in print. And it does seem that if you record a podcast, if it's something that is permanently recorded, that you could still be sued for liable. Okay, so I feel like, I feel like the mercury is in

“something and that's why everyone's chippy right now. Mercury is in retrograde. Mercury is in retrograde,”

so I'm being liableous. We just thought like, what's another corner of the internet we can get mad? Let's talk about AI again. Anyway, we're going to take a retrograde break. Come back for the big pill crow. Hope you're still with us. And we're back. Sorry, we all we got to 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 that's just giggle harder. Okay, so we wanted to talk about

what's going to happen when AI takes other jobs? What's going to happen when AI takes all of our jobs? We 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 then I began, I like literally heard people talking about it dinner and a restaurant the same night. Like, you know, it was a big

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 color worker in America all at once, right?”

Yeah. And so what I said to Katherine was, what's the likelihood of real job retraining? What can we really expect it to be done? What could be done in a better economic and an optimist economy situation? What would we hope that would be provided for people who whose jobs are going to be taken by AI by in part because it's government policy to be all in on AI. Yeah, our episode last season about AI was very much,

I think 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, into really put in perspective. I think the short version would be, and that was a year ago, and people are still like, it's going to change everything tomorrow, and you're like, 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, like, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, right? And the the upshot of

that episode is that it takes a long time for technology to be adopted into firms, used on the job, and then actually increased 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.

“Remember that there are 170 million people working in our economy, and you do not have 170”

million people using AI in the job or seeing AI on the job, and especially in a way that makes them

either more productive or redundant. That was the part that I was like productivity, it doesn't shoot up, and if you find that to hard to believe, it means worth knowing, productivity didn't show a large jump up with computers, with the internet, right? Like you imagine how much the internet has changed your job, even that took over a decade to be adopted into the workplace, and it probably too until it was reasonably adopted. So I think it's very hard

to change how people do jobs. 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 ten is a good way to force people you say. Hi. Yeah, I mean, the other thing is that when a firm says that they are either not hiring or firing or making any type of head count decisions based on AI, you have no reason to believe them. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a very convenient fall guy that has almost no way of being validated.

And I don't even think it's a fall guy. I think it's actually deliberate. It's a messet, also the guy who wrote that column in Block thinks this, 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. I mean, I think Block's stock price shot up after that announcement, right? Yeah. Because it made payment processing firm appear to be an AI generated firm. It's like,

you process payments. How much AI do you need? Yeah. I mean, it's highly manipulable. Like, if you know the stock market is looking for like, oh, we're too concentrated in text stocks and we need to find places to invest that rely on AI. Don't just build the AI and we need to diversify. Like, I can make money firing people from the market. Awesome. Yeah, but people, I mean,

companies have always made money firing people, right? Like, that's been true for decades.

Well, they do until they don't. It depends on when and how they do it and what the announcement is. Because at some point, like, you can see this habit forming in recessions where like a bunch of

“people have done layoffs and then the pressure from shareholders is, we'll you need to do some”

layoffs too because everybody's cleaning house. Yeah. So there's more peer pressure to corporate decisions than they would probably like to admit. But I think what this episode is to say, like, let's say AI does take jobs. And let's, you know, the take them at their word, take them at their word, say AI is taking 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

about it? And I actually did a closed door testimony on Capitol Hill to a congressional committee about this closed door. It wasn't a public testimony. I think that isn't that even like, I don't know more fancy pants behind closed doors. I honestly they do it so that members have a chance to ask. It's like a like a safe space to ask questions. Like, truly briefing. It's not a testimony. It's like a briefing to one side of the house. And so I did one ages ago and just kind of said like,

There's very little the government can do to make private companies not fire people if they want to.

“So you should probably regulate this. So it's not violating privacy and also algorithms are”

really racist. So maybe look into that. But the the aside from like those problems, which I like all those like IT problems, like those aren't on labor economists to fix. I mean, 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. You know,

we can take the kind of wind out of the spooky sales of AI by giving people a really good outside option from the government. Okay. Do you think that there are things that are specific to the AI job? The kind of job laws we might anticipate from AI that would be different. All right. So the US deciding to help people who don't have a job. There's really like a few

“areas of this. One is during the depression. And this was we're going to do everything we can.”

And the US it didn't have an unemployment system at the time. And so it leaned a lot on public employment service. This is like WPA projects within the public employment service included like

the civilian conservation core and the WPA. And there's been flashes of that since. So, you know,

big Blizzard hit New York last month in mom Donnie has done what a lot of mayors have done, which is a public employment of like if you come with a shovel, we're going to give you some money. And then the path gets cleared right away. Right. It's short term public and service. Public temporary public temporary. So that was pursued during the great depression. And then afterwards, lots of people have proposed it as an anti poverty program as an economic investment program,

something like manufacturing job loss program. Like there's lots of people who have wanted to have

“a public jobs guarantee of public employment service, something like that. But we haven't really”

done it to any large degree outside of the great depression. What we have had is unemployment insurance, which is 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 not broken broken, but going to be

broken since the 70s and we've never fixed it. So it's now it goes to fewer than half of the

unemployed. We're meant to replace about half of wages and they used to and now they replaced 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. And that varies also from state to state. And that also varies from state to state. Now the third kind of era is that 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 that 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 like a flat federal add-on to their weekly state benefit. And they created this wrap around unemployment insurance program for people who weren't

eligible for unemployment insurance. Like people were self-employed or something? 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 go 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. So that was the like it's a big disaster and we're going to make

it a federal wrap around. Are the benefits the same? Well in hurricanes, they get the state average weekly wage because they don't have a good enough earnings history or they don't have an earnings history from W2 employment. They get a function of the state's average weekly wage and the pandemic you were supposed to like submit documents of how much you earned and it also had some fraud issues. Got it. Okay. So that is how we help people. The only like 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? This is like factory factory

22. But what year did it start? 62. It's been 50 years? 60 years. Yes. It's had a resurgence after the free trade agreements of the 1990s. I mean 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 hybrid. Yeah. I mean there's a million ways that can be really difficult. What was it called?

Trade Adjustment Assistance. Adjustment Assistance. Then the program itself never had that good of

funding. And then 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 mid-sized city. It's not training can't create jobs. I could put 300 people into a 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. I think a lot about that book, Jamesville, Jamesville, all those people who lost their job in Jamesville, Wisconsin, when an auto manufacturing plan went shut down and there was ripple effects

to all that. And that the job training that people got, I mean like the people became prison guards.

Yeah, the jobs weren't as good. The jobs weren't as good. And even then, like a lot of people didn't make it through the training, they needed jobs. They didn't have time to go 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 the training for a job. Wasn't necessarily going to be as good. It's an absolutely heartbreaking book. I have said since like the day I finished it that every

labor economist in the country needs to read this book. Like you shouldn't be allowed to do research

“on unemployment if you have not read Jamesville. It's a GM plan. 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 that represented Jamesville was Paul Ryan, who made like a big deal about like Obama lied to my high school buddies. And then he has like a total heel turn. I didn't have a book. He is he is running for vice president. And so he he starts the book like very invested about what's going to happen in Jamesville.

And the people who lose their job and by the end of the book like he's gone. And if he sounds familiar to Optimus listeners, it's because this is the paper bag guy. Yeah. Who does a lunch bag? This is a lunch bag guy. I paint Paul Ryan who doesn't think that children who don't have food should have a lunch empty paper bag of their souls. So we should say James it's the book is called Jamesville, an American story and it's by Amy Goldstein, who was a Washington Post reporter

covering the campaign who went back and she goes back over like three or four years to cover

“Jamesville. The book came out in 2017. Oh, it's so good. But I think we can take a lot of lessons”

from what has come before, which is number one, America doesn't care that much about unemployed people.

I've always thought that 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 at that hard because if someone who works hard looks hard and did everything right, loses their job, what does that say about you? Yeah. That's so vulnerable. Yeah. That we're all vulnerable. And I think I think yeah, nobody wants to think about that. Yeah, people are like my job is safe because I work hard. So if someone who works hard loses their job, it like it absolutely threatens

my worldview and so it's easier for me to write off unemployed people as worse than me and having empathy with the unemployed. I mean, it's just not there. And yeah, if you were in a newsroom, you know, you had to learn empathy with the unemployed real quick because, you know, people who are smarter than you lost their job all the time. I think a lot of people have no experience with that, especially the people who feel like their jobs are currently threatened by AI that

the part of the desperation comes from, like, but I did the right things. Yeah. You know, I went to college. I got a job and a good sector. I, you know, I've worked for a big employer, like the idea that you could be vulnerable after making quote unquote the right decisions is very scary. Especially because we judge people in the 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 our history. You know, I think it's so much easier to judge people for doing something wrong as opposed to recognizing that the economy can just, it can do all out a really bad

in this economy. You can view even if you, I don't know. I don't think I should take this metaphor

“further. Well, I mean, we should sort through reminding people that, what did you say?”

2 million people who's their job every month? Yeah, lay people in the United States.

Let me get you the Fred. Ask Fred. Ask Fred. So layoffs and discharges includes people who were fired. People who were laid off or people whose job ended either because their business closed or because they had a temporary job that ended. And every month, I would say for the past three years, it's average around 1.7 million people every month. We should say what Fred is? Oh, Fred is the federal reserve economic database and it's run out of the federal reserve

Bank of St. Louis and so Fred is like a compendium of all publicly published data.

Fred is great, Fred's been around basically like before there was the internet. There was Fred.

“It does have a companion, which is actually I think a sleeper hit amongst the data nerd”

community is that it has a Alfred. So Fred, his federal reserve economic data, Alfred is the archive federal reserve economic data. So Alfred has everything. Alfred has like, you know, the amount of money for funding for every line item of government spending going back to like the 1930s Alfred will have and it'll have meetings of the federal reserve. Like Alfred is like it's all of the history is on Alfred and then the current data releases are on Fred. Fred and Alfred

are my besties. Excellent. 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 in it ended in 2022. I'm not seeing anything here existing or even a pattern that resembles something that would help for potentially major economic shift. Even if it happened over,

“even if it didn't happen, who wrote that essay that said we're in our February 2020 moment?”

Oh, I didn't read this. Oh, okay. I saw it on the Wall Street Journal. But like they were basically saying this is our February 2020 moment. We don't know like AI is going to hit us like the pandemic. We have no idea it's coming. Now again, I don't buy all of that hype again. This is AI people, you know, hyping their own stuff. The essay was by an investor whose name is Matt Schumer and he says it wasn't meant to go viral and he didn't mean to scare people. The one thing I

will add to your recap is we do have public money for training programs in the US, but those training programs are often limited. It's like related to work requirements like you often have to be very poor in order to be eligible for money for training. Now American job centers are where kind of like a central hub for this. It's called the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act, Weowa. 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 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. It's not not that. So once we lose all of our jobs to AI, what is the hope? Getting a note from production. This is sad. Yeah, I mean 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. And I understand that some people can get on paid work and podcasting, but some people, some people, that's maybe not where they want to go and smart people, agile people, people who can learn a lot and learn quickly, but what, you know, what are they going to do? 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. So I think that part of the optimism from this has to come from the fact that most people do not

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.”

What about women? Sure. So yeah, I mean, you have switchboard operators, typists, a lot of classical receptionist jobs. You have sorts of secretarial jobs. Yeah, all sorts of secretarial jobs, computers used to be women. We have lost occupations before, and this is something that happens in our economy. We destroy jobs. That's just a, that is part of our economic history. And so this is not new from that perspective. 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. And 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, health care benefits, and retirement benefits. Even as the economy was growing, over like a 30-year period, we lost 8 million manufacturing jobs. And more than likely, we lost a lot more than that, but we gained new ones that had different exposures to technology. I just say this to bring up that like, the job loss isn't unique. The obsolescence isn't unique. The technology taking over what could be something to

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. Do you have a idea about what should we”

be doing? The first thing we need to do is like replace our state level unemployment system

that sucks. I wrote my dissertation on unemployment insurance. You guys already? It sucks. That is what much that is. That is a doctor-edward. That is me going from Catherine to Dr. Edwards, things sucks. So we did a whole episode on unemployment insurance in all the ways we can change it, but the 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? Think about this in the context of AI. Legitimately, you lose your job to AI. What kind of unemployment spell will you have? Some people that spell is going to be really short. They need some cash quickly in order to stay afloat, but they'll find a job in a couple of 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, but the government should

invest in the pivot that careers need to take sometimes. This has two side bar issues that are catastrophically large. I was just going to ask if any states do this well. No, because you really need universal health insurance. Yeah. One of the things that people talk about the most with unemployment is that 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. To true, why would I want to get off health insurance if my employer doesn't offer it? I mean, I would argue it makes

“the job search a lot harder if you have to find a job with health insurance. So problem one health”

insurance, problem two is that we'd have to do a little restructuring around how we charge for education. Specific to people who lose their job to AI and face, you know, obsolescence or maybe a career that they can't use anymore. If the government were to pay for retraining, we'd need to have different offerings from our education and retraining system. Like we have a two-year degree, we have four-year degree, we have four profit trade schools. We would need some more options

to really cultivate this kind of mid-career job loss retraining market for what it's worth. I think the government can do that because if it's paying for something, I think colleges and universities would meet them where they are. 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, like, they did not want to be in school for four years. Like they had been in the military,

They did not want to be there for four years. And a tradition of degree. So schools offered

accelerated programs specifically for GIs so that they could get the degree and go. And actually George Herbert Walker Bush did this at you. You know, it's funny. I mean, I feel like we have a lot of those things in community colleges. Now, though I suppose they vary again from such a state and place to place. Well, they need to because they should be built around local employers. One thing we can do is we can expand

apprenticeships, which are really good programs. They require a nationally recognized credential.

“That's what makes them so good is that they're selective, but we could expand apprenticeships.”

I mean, it's a lot of school. It's a lot of nights. I mean, it would be hard to do if you had young kids. But I think that with better public programs, we will start to see more apprenticeships. So a lot of states have been experimenting with a child care worker apprenticeship. Or like a home health care worker apprenticeship. The problem with those two is that apprenticeships cost time and money and the jobs don't pay. The jobs don't pay. Yeah. If we had a different system,

like a universal child care system and the jobs were paid at a reasonable rate, the government could reimburse at like an apprenticeship level. And then yeah, we would open up opportunities. So I think that's all one aspect of it is we could do all those things. And I think it sounds like boiling the ocean, but a lot of the pieces are there. I mean, the US is the envy of the world in having a community college system like we do. We have lots of opportunities for people

“to pick up second careers if they want to. I think 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 really know 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, right? So they're building these big chip. Computer chip centers in Arizona. And you just looked at them and there's like one guy working and everything else is robots.

I mean, it's an amazing system, but it's not going to bring in a bunch of people to work in that factory. You know, it's that is the way that manufacturing is going. But there's lots of places where like I don't see that ever happening. I don't ever see like high service

oriented sectors like restaurants or hotels or entertainment venues. Like they're always

going to demand a ton of labor, childcare, education, health, always is going to demand a ton of labor, right? Yeah. A lot of unemployed people in like sociological studies and ethnographic studies, they'll say the same thing of like once they realize that they weren't going to get that job back, like they just went ahead and like left in different directions and started businesses or yeah, or moved across the country or did different things or I'm sure you know so many

second careers of people who were journalists who went on to do other things and were on hit Houston so hard. Yeah. Largest most infamous I think corporate scandal in U.S. history and those people lost everything because at the time there weren't regulations on retirement contributions and all of their retirement was tied up in Enronstock, right? Which crashed. And

“we, I remember we had a guy come to the house who I think was another soccer parent and he was an Enron”

layoff who became a full-time carpenter and I remember him like when we came and he installed it and he measured and he came back and my dad was like because the Enron like prosecution was going on by that point and the guy was like yeah I mean I helped they all burn and hell but I am

happier. I will never forget the casual way he said it. I was just like oh yeah I mean I

hope they die in jail but this has been better for me and it's been something like as I became a researcher and looking at the unemployed like you do have the Jamesville's of the world where a lot of people go through terrible terrible times but there is like night as 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 situation. It's not going to work for everyone which is why we have to have other methods and other backup systems but I think we we basically do nothing so we can do a lot more and then there's a whole other separate part about we could have public employment service again and like a job guarantee and things like that and then there's that and then there's that the whole thing

about a public job guarantee which um man 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

Ruston and a Philip Randolph they came up with a budget to like revitalize the black

“community and give them the economic opportunities they've never had and it included a public job”

guarantee anything else any other optimism for us I didn't know do you feel optimistic after that or you like it's like a really big to do list it was listening to the guy used to be he was like the chief economist for the treasury department okay on marketplace and they were talking about the tariffs but one of the things he said was one of the lessons that he was taking away from the tariffs was that the fact that the economy did not crash out of the tariffs

this is right after the Supreme Court ruling is that the US economy is just really really

big and diverse but I thought that it was you know it's a reminder that humans experience the weather

from like six feet to the ground like that's that's that's weather to us but that the but weather is actually happening all the way up to 30,000 feet in the in this guy and the economies like that too we feel the economy in our house but the economy is is so much bigger than that and that the economy will survive AI it will and the economy will survive AI and we have to

“I think that the position of public policy should be you know what can we do to facilitate”

the transition to whatever comes next right and you know I think people say whoa if only we had all the money in the world we do have all the money in the world where America but also it's I think it's not as expensive as people think because unemployment is still really rare and it doesn't feel rare when you're going through it but it's still I mean even when the economy is at its absolute worst 90% of people have a job so being able to do right by those 10% of

people is completely feasible if we don't think that we need to punish them for being bad at economy and in consider that we could be in their place and so let's give them the right type of structures that we could absolutely afford and they won't all need it like some people like they'll lose their job to AI and they'll get another one and some people they'll lose their job to AI and it'll take a minute but they'll get another one and then some people will have to pivot

either because they couldn't find a job or because they just decided they wanted to and when I say right type of structure I mean not just supporting go back to work as soon as humanly possible at whatever the cost or whatever the wage I mean go back and get a good job or pivot to your next career as a funny I mean my best friend and I actually talk about all the time about our pivot to our our next career the thing about PhDs and biology is that they can actually have a pretty

short career span because once they unless they get like the golden ticket and funding for forever

they they lose out so we've always talked about like our future pivot hers comes from no longer

being able to get grants to support her research but like it's the pivot like what are you going to

“do next I think we can talk openly about AI pivots like AI makes your job obsolete what are you”

going to do like what is if you pivoted what would it be actually this is a great question Robin what is your pivot AI AI takes away your job what career would you do oh mine's a run a book store okay I'm guilty I said this is because you wanted to say run a book store run a coffee shop bookstore coffee during the day wine bar tonight yes please you know that or gardening service and just to help people like gardening and landscaping I would love to just work on people's

gardens all day or my yard anytime what is yours AI has made me absolutely oh so I have been thinking about this right and I said to my wife the other day that I want a yoga co-op I want to run a yoga co-op if y'all like if you are 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 and we can absolutely build a banger unemployment system

that helps people through this transition that looks very different that has very different outcomes and will you know filter people to all kinds of directions but it it starts with sympathy for the unemployed all right we're going to take a quick break and we'll be right back okay we're back we all have jobs and some for executive orders it's time for executive orders it's a dictate

what you executive order a bathroom well optimistic 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 in the American people coming from politicians there's a whole compendium of things you're not allowed to say to pregnant people yeah i'm going to add to the word ban list today which is electable not allowed to say electable anymore I like that for a lot of good reasons well if i'd ever apply to anyone who wasn't a woman maybe i feel differently but yeah we're not allowed to be electable anymore yeah i'm gonna rant real quick in the same way just real quick

i need to like i need to get this off my chest the thing that gets me about electability is like

hopefully we just came back from all that thing that we cut because i i went out and ran some out of an election but um no more electability let's just vote for the people who stayed up for what you believe in yeah yeah anyway because screaming to a paper bag we'd write back before what's yours yeah mine assuming that the abstinence will be in the news forever because it certainly feels that way no more pictures of abstine or whatever her name is

Maxwell on vacation in France or at parties in New York like you know what i i don't think people realize this continuing glamorization of these sex traffickers and pedophiles just because we've decided that everything that it goes online needs a photograph find something else just find something else we do not need ever to see smurking pictures of Jeffrey obscene ever again and that makes me almost as mad as your thing what just spiritual sponsor spiritual sponsors

it's a big cleanse spiritual sponsor it's my yeah my spiritual sponsor yeah our 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 it's typically

in like a walkable area and it's always a great way to get to know a locality by going to

their local bookstore yeah i'm gonna shout out Sophie's spiritual sponsor so it's lent as we're recording this right now which is the period between Ashwin's and Easter when people often give things up as a sacrifice and other things were supposed to do that anyway there's a guy on tiktok who's who's a Catholic dad who's doing one really really cringy thing on tiktok every day for lunch as a as a way to add in a learn humility he's very funny my spiritual sponsor

because again it's this time of year is back here at avocados we've got eight of them on our counter right now makes everything good makes everything good y'all i just want to do a quick background that rob it and i were doing a planning call and i was trying to make a lunch and i she heard me yell at my husband wait did you take the last avocado and she's like not in this house got avocado's for days that was province response to oh no you took the last avocado i'm gonna

put in my lunch it was not a problem here not a problem here not right now i can't ever be accused of being a avocado on toast millennial because i just like to buy them directly on a tortilla chip or we put them on everything chop them up put them in your soup put them on your salad put them with your eggs this is like when pizza is on a bag oh you're gonna have pizza anytime okay well from other things we should probably wrap this up okay if we were being broadcast this is the

point where we'd be kicked off the air yeah it's like put we're like we're like public access cable this point oh yeah yeah the optimistic economy podcast is edited by Sophie Laman our video production for social media is by Andy Robinson here we go let's keep those two in pay checks if you have the means please contribute we'll take them at optimisticconami.com we will also sell you a shirt a hats a tote bag video close from our show or on tiktok instagram youtube

“in linkedin you should definitely send them to people who you think should be listening or who”

love making nasty comments if you're on sub stack you could follow it's hard to join oh no i just

to step in because you know i never am talking about self-force here if you're on sub stack you could

“follow us there too join the optimist chat to talk with fellow optimists where he's dropping”

both of us try to chime in and um wait that's part we already said so subscribe to the youtube

channel rate us on apple podcast we're giving you a lot of f*cking listeners but the meantime

“we love you when we couldn't do this out without you and we do this for you so we hope you enjoyed it”

Andy we're not on ebay come on now you're just throwing us production get it in line