A Working (Class) Economy with Kathryn Anne Edwards

Jon Stewart (0:00)

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Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Weekly Show Podcast. My name is Jon Stewart. I will be the host of your podcast. It is Tuesday, October 6th. If I seem a little bit rattled today, it is I'm still coming down from a conversation that I had on The Daily Show last night with a gentleman by the name of Jacob Cox and who was a researcher at Anthropic and Open AI and who left me with a very unsettled feeling about what the future might look like if AI doesn't work out well. But I think even more unsettling was the way he was describing the future if AI did work out, which is sort of this weird, this futile system where our tech overlords suddenly, even though our experience with them has been they are hoarding wealth and power, they will suddenly get to a point where their companies are so valuable and have created such productivity that they just decide to then share that largesse with everybody as to quell them from the disruption of none of us having jobs anymore. Just go check it out. Because I was a little, I'm going to go with rattled.

But today's episode is the un-rattling. It is the un-rattling of all those things is about our economy, how to rebalance it, how to regain the upper hand on our overlords, and how to re-tec and otherwise. So let's just get into it.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am delighted. Delighted. You'll hear it in my voice, you'll see it in my facial expressions. Delighted to welcome our guest today, Kathryn Anne Edwards, economist, not just an economist, PhD labor economist, but a public policy consultant, writer and the host of Optimist Economy. Please welcome Kathryn Anne Edwards. Kathryn, how are you?

Kathryn Anne Edwards (3:41)

I'm very well, thank you for having me.

Jon Stewart (3:43)

I'm delighted. Forget about thank you. I'm delighted because I'm a big fan of the way that you explain our economy in an evidence-based, very clear-cut, there's no nonsense, and I so appreciate what you do.

Kathryn Anne Edwards (4:04)

Oh my God, Jon, I'm so touched. Thank you.

Jon Stewart (4:07)

It's Kathryn Anne Edwards, right?

Kathryn Anne Edwards (4:09)

It is. I'm just really touched.

Jon Stewart (4:11)

You know, I got a real economist thing going. Kathryn, I want to talk to you today. The reason why I was very much interested in talking to you is, you know, we see all these, the economy is moving towards increased productivity. That's the whole, the buzzword is all about AI and increased productivity. And I am of the mindset that our economy has been out of balance, more so over the last 50 years and moving increasingly. And your work seems to be bearing out that hypothesis.

Would you mind just discussing a little bit, just to set the stage at first? What are the ways in which the American economy has become out of balance? I view it sort of through the lens of between labor and capital.

Kathryn Anne Edwards (5:08)

The simplest way to understand it is that workers have less power than they used to.

And worker power comes from a lot of places. For an individual, it's the education and experience and skills that you have, your people skills, your work ethic. But it also comes from how strong the economy is anytime. The unemployment rate is low or high, if there's lots of jobs to get. And then it comes through structural organization of how we privilege one set of people in the economy over another.