January 7, 2025
Ozempic and Your Community
As holiday treats give way to New Year’s Resolutions, the names of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy will be on millions of lips this January—in addition to any leftover fruitcake, eggnog, cookies, and latkes. But the benefits of these drugs aren’t limited to what they can do for an individual’s health. Recent analysis…
January 3, 2025
AI and People: Better Together
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has sparked widespread debate about its potential to displace highly-skilled workers. Recent research by Emilio Colombo and his colleagues, Towards the Terminator Economy, offers a more encouraging view. The authors’ findings suggest that among more highly skilled workers, generative AI may actually enhance productivity, increase wages, and boost employment….
January 2, 2025
AI Will Have a Major Impact on Labor Markets. Here’s How the US Can Prepare
The nation can do better at forecasting AI-driven job and skill changes, including with a data-focused nonprofit that examines the technology’s impact. Markets are the killer app for efficiently organizing unfathomably complex human activities to deliver innovation and prosperity. They can also shift suddenly, creating winners and losers, even as broad measures of economic health…
December 10, 2024
Fighting in-work poverty: the minimum wage versus in-work benefits
Abstract We review evidence on the effectiveness of the minimum wage versus in-work benefit policies in reducing poverty in OECD countries. The most credible evidence suggests that raising the minimum wage is an ineffective policy tool for reducing poverty. On net, minimum wage increases tend to redistribute rather than reduce poverty. In contrast, government subsidies…
November 27, 2024
Finally, a Win for Working Men
Since the 1970s, working men, particularly those without college degrees, have experienced lower employment rates, increased social isolation and growing health risks. Today, we are starting to see early signs that this problem may be abating. But lately, men have started going back to work. During most recessions, the male employment rate falls and never returns…
November 25, 2024
Don’t Write Off Workforce Pell Grants
Education Secretary nominee Linda McMahon, a former administrator of the Small Business Administration, is a proponent of expanding Pell Grants to short-term workforce education programs. In a September op-ed, McMahon boosted the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, which would allow students to use Pell Grants for high-quality workforce education programs as short as eight weeks in duration (the…
November 22, 2024
A Side Effect of the Booming Job Market: Wage Inequality Is Way Down
Lessons of the post-COVID economy. When voters tell you what they are concerned about, believe them. Exit polls from the presidential election the show that the economy ranked first among voters’ concerns at 32 percent, almost three times more than the next closest issue, immigration. A plurality of voters—45 percent—said that their financial situation was worse than…
November 21, 2024
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work
Summary Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) promise to improve productivity significantly, but there are many questions about how AI could affect jobs and workers. Recent technical innovations have driven the rapid development of generative AI systems, which produce text, images, or other content based on user requests – advances which have the potential to complement…
November 15, 2024
Calibration: Making AI a Partner at Work
Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping the workforce, yet the workers who stand to benefit the most are often the most wary of it. Lower-skilled and less-educated workers view AI as a threat, fearing job loss and marginalization. But research tells a different story. These workers could gain the most from AI—if they learn to use…
November 12, 2024
Irresistible Policy, Meet the Unmovable Labor Market
Gad Levanon, chief economist at The Burning Glass Institute, analyzed data relating to the share of undocumented workers in a wide variety of trades and lower-wage, lower-skilled occupations, as well as higher-skilled jobs in construction and manufacturing. Bear in mind that many of these occupations are related to housing, the largest contributor to our recent bout of high…