The Economics of Work — a podcast by Revelio Labs
Latest episode
Episode 17 · Ioana Marinescu · 50 min
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 Marinescu, professor at Penn and one of the leading researchers on labor market power, to dig into what monopsony actually means, why it matters, and what it would take to fix it.
Previous episodes
Episode 16 · Roberto Rigobon · 57 min
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 exists. In this episode, Ben sits down with Roberto Rigobon, MIT economist and founder of the Billion Prices Project, to explore what gets lost when measurement fails.
Episode 15 · Deena Mousa · 37 min
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 sits down with Deena Mousa, program officer at Coefficient Giving and writer on AI and global development, to explore what gets missed when we only think about AI's impact through a Western lens.
Episode 14 · Luis Garicano · 50 min
Why the Most Valuable Work Is the Hardest to Automate
The jobs most protected from AI aren't necessarily the most credentialed ones. They're the ones where tasks are so tightly bundled together that pulling one thread unravels the whole thing. In this episode, Ben sits down with Luis Garicano, LSE professor and author of Messy Jobs, to dig into what makes some work durable, how organizations need to reconfigure around AI, and why Europe may be in serious trouble.
Episode 13 · Ronnie Chatterji · 44 min
How The Labor Market Looks From Inside Open AI
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.
Episode 12 · Bill Easterly · 35 min
What We Get Wrong About Foreign Aid
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.
Episode 11 · Isabella Loaiza · 41 min
Beyond Exposure
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.
Hosted by Ben Zweig
Ben Zweig is a labor economist and the CEO of Revelio Labs, a workforce intelligence company. A passionate advocate for understanding the evolving nature of work, Ben also teaches The Future of Work at NYU Stern. Before founding Revelio Labs, he was a Managing Data Scientist at IBM’s Chief Analytics Office and a Quantitative Strategist at an emerging markets hedge fund. He holds a PhD in Economics from the CUNY Graduate Center, and he is the author of Job Architecture: Building a Language for Workforce Intelligence.
“Ever since taking my first economics class 20 years ago, I’ve been trying to learn as much as possible about how and why we do what we do. For me, the best way to do that is to listen to the people who have thought the most deeply about it.”
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