Welcome to the ‘Take This Job and Shove It’ Economy
About this episode
Labor economist Betsey Stevenson analyzes the pandemic economy's worker-power moment: with unemployment insurance, stimulus checks, and childcare disruptions reshaping the reservation wage, workers could afford to quit bad jobs — the take-this-job-and-shove-it economy. She debates whether enhanced UI kept people home or merely gave them leverage, assesses childcare as the binding constraint on women's employment, and weighs inflation risks: temporary supply shocks versus unanchored expectations, plus the fight over Biden's American Rescue Plan between Larry Summers and deficit-spenders. She defends aiming for a full-employment economy that compresses wages upward and argues care work must count as infrastructure.