The Economics of Work with Ben Zweig

What does it look like to do economics from inside the AI revolution with access to data nobody else has, and questions nobody has figured out how to answer yet?

In this episode, Ben sits down with Ronnie Chatterji, chief economist at OpenAI, to pull back the curtain on how economic research gets done at a frontier AI lab.

Topics covered:

• Why the right time horizon for AI economics is a mix of real-time, medium-term, and scenario ...

The story of foreign aid is usually told as a story of insufficient resources. Bill Easterly thinks that misses the point.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Bill Easterly, NYU economist and author of four books on development, to dig into why aid so often fails, and why the problem runs deeper than most people are willing to admit.

Topics covered:

• From disappointment to concern: how Easterly's view of foreign aid evolved from "z...

The dominant framework for measuring AI's impact on jobs may be asking the wrong question entirely.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Isabella Loaiza, economist and researcher at MIT, to challenge some of the most widely accepted assumptions in the AI and work debate. From the concept of "exposure" to the narrative of an incoming white-collar bloodbath, Isabella makes the case we're missing a big part of the picture around AI.

At t...

The backlash against AI among young people appears codependent as they rely on it for more and more, while also being some of its most vocal opponents.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Jasmine Sun, writer and journalist covering the AI economy, to explore what youth sentiment toward AI reveals about jobs, inequality, and the world being built around us.

Topics covered:

• Why young people's hostility to AI is rational and what it ...

The debate about immigration is usually framed around politics and labor markets. But the deeper story includes mobility. Who gets ahead, how, and why where they start determines so much about where you end up.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Leah Boustan, professor at Yale and co-author of Streets of Gold, to dig into what the data on immigration reveals about economic opportunity across generations.

Topics covered:

• Why immig...

Finance has net present value. Operations has bottleneck theory. What does HR have?

In this episode, Ben sits down with John Boudreau, professor emeritus at USC and one of the most influential thinkers in the history of human resource management, to explore a question he has spent 40 years trying to answer: why do leaders who make rigorous, model-driven decisions about financial and operational assets continue to rely on gut instinc...

Keynes predicted we'd be working 15-hour weeks by now. So what went wrong? Does it even matter?

In this episode, Ben sits down with Dan Hamermesh, one of the most prolific and wide-ranging labor economists of the past half century, to explore questions the field rarely asks: Why do Americans work more than anyone else in the rich world? What do we actually do with leisure when we get it?

Topics covered:

• Why cutting work hours woul...

What does it take to connect the worlds of academia, government, and industry around workforce development? The answer requires someone fluent in all three.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Rachel Lipson, researcher at Harvard, fellow at Brookings and the Aspen Institute, and author, to explore what's working (and what isn't) in America's approach to training workers for the jobs of today and tomorrow.

Topics covered:

• Why busin...

What happens to a job when AI touches it? The answer depends on something most frameworks aren't designed to measure.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Daniel Rock, assistant professor at Penn and co-founder of Work Helix, to dig into AI exposure.

Topics covered:

• What "AI exposure" measures
• Why tasks are "assemblages," not atoms, and what that means for how we think about job change
• The task chaining paper: why the sequence in whi...

Most conversations about the future of work focus on technology. This one focuses on people.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Alexis Fink, organizational psychologist and president of SIOP — the Society for Industrial-Organizational Psychology — to explore what over a century of behavioral science actually tells us about how work gets done, why organizations succeed or fail, and what leaders get dangerously wrong abou...

Five years after the pandemic reshaped where and how we work, where have we actually landed?

In this episode, Ben sits down with Nick Bloom, professor of economics at Stanford and the world's leading researcher on remote and hybrid work. Drawing on surveys of hundreds of thousands of workers across many countries,Nick unpacks what the data actually shows about productivity, innovation, and the future of the office.

Topics covered:

What makes a transaction repugnant? And why does society allow some controversial markets to flourish while banning others that seem far less harmful?

In this episode, Ben sits down with Al Roth, Nobel laureate and professor of economics at Stanford, to explore the hidden moral architecture beneath the markets we take for granted, and the ones we don't allow at all. Drawing on his new book Moral Economics, Al makes the case that goo...

In this episode, Ben sits down with David Autor, professor of economics at MIT, to explore how technology transforms work at every level from individual tasks to entire industries.

Topics covered:

• Why transformative technologies require organizational reinvention, not just adoption
• The "expertise framework": how the same automation can be a force multiplier for one worker and a threat to another, depending on where their specializ...