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Optimist Economy
30 episodes
Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising: The Invitation (Ep. 1)
Aug 11, 2026 · 38 min
Optimist Economy is on break this month, but we know that optimist listeners are interested in tales of economic history, issues of inequality and movements for change. So we thought some of you might enjoy "Occupy!" a six-part narrative series about Occupy Wall Street, the 2011 protest village that lasted nearly two months and turned a spotlight on systemic economic inequality in the U.S. --- EPISODE 1: An Invitation In 2011, a handful of skeptical New Yorkers answer a call to Occupy Wall Stree…
Stop Donating Your Vacation Days to Your Boss
Ep 28 · Aug 4, 2026 · 50 min
Nearly 90% of private-sector workers get paid vacation days from their job, but a Pew survey found 46% leave at least some of it on the table. Government survey data also show that the share of workers who are on vacation in any given week has fall by about half between 1980 and 2022. Blame thin staffing, guilt culture, and “PTO bundles” that push people to ration days between vacation days and sick leave. The fix exists elsewhere: the European Union, for instance, guarantees 20 paid days a year…
The Government is Already Paying for Your Health Insurance, Buddy
Ep 27 · Jul 28, 2026 · 48 min
About 18% of U.S. GDP every year gets spent on health care. Half of that, 9%, is coming from the government, which is about the whole cost of other countries’ public health programs. In other words, for what the U.S. spends on Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare, VA benefits, and the tax write-off for employer-sponsored plans, we could have free basic health insurance for everyone. This is why the co-authors of the 2023 book “We’ve Got You Covered” describe the current health insurance system as a total…
Mr. Justin Time Sets a Cruel Work Schedule
Ep 26 · Jul 21, 2026 · 49 min
Just-in-time scheduling lets an algorithm decide when — and whether — millions of people work. Surveys find 40% of shift workers (mostly in retail and food service) don’t know their schedule a week in advance. They can also get sent home mid-shift or asked to be on call, unpaid. Studies show that more than 50% of hourly workers’ income swings up to 30% month-to-month, making it hard to budget for rent, qualify for benefits, or plan. A landmark study done at The Gap a decade ago proved stable sch…
Young Americans Should Be Raising Hell About Social Security
Ep 25 · Jul 14, 2026 · 44 min
Nobody has more riding on any changes to Social Security than people under 40. The trust fund is currently projected to run dry in the fourth quarter of 2032, but it could be sooner. Every election, starting in November, selects the lawmakers who will shape the program’s future. Neglecting to fix its finances will mean an automatic 22% cut to everyone's benefit. But for Millennials and Zoomers, what’s at stake isn't your elders’ monthly check — it’s the only life insurance, disability insurance,…
Simple Immigration Economics: Bigger is Better
Jul 7, 2026 · 52 min
(Originally aired 6/24/2025) One in five workers in the United States was born in another country. Without them, the country’s prime-age workforce would be shrinking, and thus so would our economy. So the calumny (Terms & Conditions) directed at immigrants is at odds with the basic fact that the U.S. needs them. What about depressing wages? Research finds such a mixed bag of results that the overall effect is about zero. Indeed, if the goal is to save “American jobs” or help American workers, th…
America at 250: Case for the Defense
Ep 23 · Jun 30, 2026 · 53 min
It’s the United States’ semiquincentennial … and one of us is not feeling it. The other is literally carrying a flag in her bag — and that’s just her road flag. Kathryn Anne Edwards makes her case for optimism right now: The U.S. is undergoing one of the most dramatic demographic and cultural shifts of any industrialized nation. Americans agree that Congress is broken. And the people's agenda on wages, childcare, money in politics, and Social Security polls above 80%. Maybe this isn’t a backslid…
Optimist Q&A: The AI Bubble, the Rapture, and Free Lunch
Ep 22 · Jun 23, 2026 · 52 min
We can’t give financial advice. Or feedback on your 20-page tax proposal. But economist Kathryn Edwards did take a run at nearly 20 listener questions in under 60 minutes. Among them: Why care about birth rates if robots are taking all the jobs? What happens if the AI bubble bursts? Will the dollar collapse? Can the bond market sway the White House? Plus: Why the minimum wage matters even if it doesn’t alleviate most poverty and how to argue for universal free school lunch. Chapters: 1:43 — AI &…
Inflation Risk is the Wrong Recession Lesson
Ep 21 · Jun 16, 2026 · 50 min
This might be the most dangerous economic assertion circulating today: the high inflation from 2021-2023 was caused by government stimulus. The talking point on the right goes: the third COVID-era stimulus checks landed in March 2021, prices took off, case closed. Of course reality is more nuanced. And most serious estimates pin only a point or two of the inflation peak on the bill; the rest was supply chain chaos, a global chip shortage, and the Ukraine war. The pandemic caused the worst job lo…
Make the Economy Work for Freelancers, Too (#askingforafriend)
Ep 20 · Jun 9, 2026 · 48 min
Thirty million Americans, more or less, work for themselves. They freelance, do gig work, have solo LLCs, or — as a certain economist says — participate in “ non-employee employment.” The economics of their situation is harder than it needs to be. Making self-employment more viable is good for everyone in the labor market, because when workers have options, they also have more power. Plus: Kathryn Anne Edwards testified before the House Ways and Means Committee, and a congressman implied she was…
About That College Grad Who Can’t Find a Job…
Ep 19 · Jun 2, 2026 · 59 min
(Originally aired 7/1/2025) Newly minted college graduates are having a harder time landing that first job than in recent years. Is it AI? Is college useless? Is it a crisis? (No. No. And not yet…) College graduates under 27 still have significantly lower unemployment rates (5.8%) than high school graduates of the same age (6.9%). What economist Kathryn Edwards finds worrying is that these new workers, who are typically a lagging economic indicator, may in this case be a bellwether of a weakenin…
Should We Cherish the Ultra-Wealthy? (a.k.a. ‘The Cornfield’)
Ep 18 · May 26, 2026 · 43 min
A certain kind of wealthy American has been griping out loud lately — about taxes, about progressive cities, about how unappreciated they are for the jobs they create, the stuff they buy, and the tips they hand out. A narrative is coalescing around them too: that the top 10% of earners now do so much of the spending, the U.S. economy relies on them. But an economy that depends so much on the people at the top isn't the healthy one the country deserves — it’s just wearing a nice suit. Chapters: 0…
No Overtime for the Supervisor of Sandwiches
Ep 17 · May 19, 2026 · 49 min
It wasn’t just hourly factory jobs that were supposed to come with a 40-hour workweek. Even salaried jobs were supposed to get overtime pay, though very few do do anymore. Overtime protections are the only legal mechanism enforcing work-hour limits, and for 50 years, the salary threshold that determines who qualifies to receive overtime has been left to erode. Employers found another workaround too: just call the sandwich maker a "sandwich manager." Now, the new no-tax-on-overtime deduction isn'…
Can the U.S. Go ‘Cashless?’
Ep 16 · May 12, 2026 · 44 min
Cash is dirty, inconvenient, and so last century. Some 70% of Americans under age 50 think its days are numbered. But we still need those greenbacks, if as an alternative to banks. More than 4% of households are “unbanked,” and three times as many are “underbanked,” meaning bank services mostly don’t work for them, so rely on services like check cashers or payday lenders. And that's before you get to the racial disparities in who banks approve for credit. Reviving banking services at the post of…
The 2026 Economy: Make it Make Sense
Ep 15 · May 5, 2026 · 58 min
Consumer sentiment is in the basement. Jobs aren't being added. Prices keep climbing. GDP barely grew at the end of 2025, and a ‘meh’ 2% last quarter. Shouldn’t this be a recession? Not so far. Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards walks through the clear cause of each bad number: Tariffs explain the prices and foul mood. Mass deportations explain the jobs. The government shutdown explained last quarter. Still, knowing the passing reasons for economic pain doesn't make it hurt less. And none of it chan…
Progress is a Long Game
Ep 14 · Apr 28, 2026 · 50 min
(Originally aired 5/06/25) What sparks progress? The right political conditions? Social pressure? Economic upheaval? In response to two listeners’ questions, we say… both none of those and all of the above. As an example, we talk through just one bit of the New Deal in the 1930s, which was the law to limit child labor. That movement started decades earlier, and continued decades afterward. For those keeping score at home, this a sneaky third installment of Kathryn’s 68-part series on the Fair La…
The Great Wage Stagnation
Ep 13 · Apr 21, 2026 · 47 min
Average U.S. wages have barely budged since the early '80s — and if you account for today's labor force being older and more college-educated, wage growth basically disappears. Economists have cycled through explanations: workers lacked technical skills, then couldn't compete with global labor, then lost the policies that once lifted paychecks, like strong unions and a meaningful minimum wage. The latest chapter is monopsony — the idea that as employers consolidate, people have fewer choices of…
Tax Reform Gone Wild
Ep 12 · Apr 14, 2026 · 46 min
From California to Washington to New York, states are trying to tax the very rich. The press keeps rehashing whether millionaires and billionaires will flee those states. Wrong question. The more important one is why we’re improvising tax policy state to state when it’s the federal government that should be dealing with health care, child care and affordability—all of which are national problems. Meanwhile, some Senate Democrats are proposing to take even more people out of the tax system entire…
Nobody's Pulling Up Stakes Anymore
Ep 11 · Apr 7, 2026 · 46 min
Americans used to move a lot in search of opportunity. But in 2024, the share of Americans who moved at all hit a 76-year low. Barely 2% of us moved across state lines. Some of that is by choice: people are more rooted, and that's not nothing. But when workers stop moving, rich cities pull further away from poor ones, wages stagnate, and the gaps between thriving labor markets and struggling ones get harder to close. And when there’s a shock to a local labor market, moving is an important releas…
The Optimists Have Questions…
Ep 10 · Mar 31, 2026 · 54 min
Fourteen questions. Zero softballs. Listeners from Tacoma to Montreal wrote in to ask about retirement savings, taxing capital gains, home-buyer assistance programs, corporate profits in the tariffs era, what one state employee can or cannot accomplish, and whether meaningful economic reform will arrive before Millennials drop dead. And more. The inbox did not disappoint. 00:00 Announcements 01:59 Is a retirement savings crisis brewing? 04:32 Tax credits for first-time home buyers… good idea? 08…
Corporate Profits Are Up. Their Tax Bill Should Be Too.
Ep 9 · Mar 24, 2026 · 42 min
The corporate income tax rate got hacked nearly in half by the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act. So nine years later, how’s that working out? Corporations’ effective tax rate (about 9%) is lower than what the average American household pays (about 14.5%). After-tax corporate profits have hit record highs for the last four years — about 9% of GDP, a figure not hit since 1929. Workers' share of total national income, by contrast, is at a 70-year low. If corporate taxes go back up, some companies may thre…
If AI Gets Hired, America Can Handle It
Ep 8 · Mar 17, 2026 · 51 min
Switchboard operators. Typists. Secretaries. Lots of factory workers. The economy has a long history of technology slowly eliminating not just jobs but entire occupations. The U.S. also has a long history of not doing a lot to help those thrown out of work by major economic shifts. Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, who literally wrote her dissertation on unemployment insurance (her professional assessment: "it sucks"), makes the case for a wholesale rebuild that triages joblessness, distinguishing…
Boomers Didn’t Ruin Everything. Really.
Ep 7 · Mar 10, 2026 · 50 min
The popular narrative is that baby boomers rode cheap houses and 401(k)s to wealth, dismantled the welfare state behind them, and left everyone else to fight over scraps. But conflating boomers and conservatives lets the latter off the hook for 25 years of tax cuts and disinvestment in children. It erases the Black boomers, poor boomers, and pensionless workers who never got a slice of that wealth. And it lays the groundwork for the one policy outcome its loudest advocates actually want: gutting…
Can $1,000 at Birth Make Us a Country of Savers?
Ep 6 · Mar 3, 2026 · 49 min
“Trump Accounts” might evoke the president’s other side hustles, like gold-plated mobile phones or meme crypto coins. But these investment accounts for children are one of the actually beautiful things to come out of the "One Big Beautiful Bill." More than 30 years in the making, these accounts have previously been pitched as KidSave, Baby Bonds, the ASPIRE Act, 401Kids. They’ve been proposed more than a dozen times by Democrats and Republicans alike. Economist Kathryn Edwards explains the long…
Social Security Upgrades for Retirement's Realities
Ep 5 · Feb 24, 2026 · 58 min
Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards is a Social Security fan girl. Would it be possible for her to love it even more? Yes, if the old-age insurance program got some updates to handle the messy, gradual and interrupted way that retirement truly transpires. Her four blue-sky pitches: changing benefit calculations for caregivers, taking benefits temporarily, a sliding “full” retirement age based on years worked, and a tax on companies that abuse 1099 non-employee compensation. Plus: A big retcon segment…
What The Actual Fed.
Ep 4 · Feb 17, 2026 · 53 min
The Federal Reserve is in the news constantly these days. Beyond the regular will-they-or-won’t-they question on interest rates, there are multiple legal battles with implications for the central bank’s independence, President Trump’s nominee for chairman may (or may not) get a hearing in the Senate soon, and Jerome Powell's may (or may not) leave when his term as chair ends in May. So let’s try to demystify the Fed. How does it stop bank panics? How did it make the Great Depression worse? What…
We Don't Have a Housing Shortage. We Have a Paycheck Shortage.
Ep 3 · Feb 10, 2026 · 45 min
Recent polls show 54% now consider housing unaffordable and the cost of homeownership dominates Americans’ economic anxieties. The popular “abundance” narrative says there’s a housing shortage and suggests cutting zoning or environmental rules will let us build our way out of it. But we don’t have a simple net shortage of units—we have a deep mismatch between what gets built and what workers get paid. After 50 years of wage stagnation, the median mortgage payment is over $2,200 while median week…
Affordability vs. the Poverty Line
Ep 2 · Feb 3, 2026 · 48 min
An essay went viral by claiming that $140,000 is what a family of four needs to just get by — a number higher than what 70% of American households earn. Conservative economists called it idiotic. Kathryn dismissed it and got a nasty DM. What’s the real controversy? It’s not that the poverty line is misleading. It's that we have no measure for our current affordability crisis. And the American mindset has been so warped by decades of bad economic policy that we think the only way to get help is t…
$79 Trillion Worth of Income Inequality
Ep 1 · Jan 27, 2026 · 49 min
Our own optimist economist Kathryn Anne Edwards worked on a research project several years ago to measure income inequality. Its massive headline number has taken on a life of its own in columns, talking points, memes. We explain how Kathryn and co-author Carter Price managed to answer this question: What would have happened to Americans’ incomes if they’d grown at the same rate as the U.S. economy overall? Spoiler alert: 90% of us would be a lot better off. Read the working paper Kathryn co-wro…
We're Back with a Backlog of Optimism
Jan 20, 2026 · 1 min
Hey optimists! Season two of Optimist Economy is finally here. New episodes coming on Tuesdays starting January 27. More at www.optimisteconomy.com
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