A labor economist explains why AI won't take your job

If AI wiped out millions of jobs, how should our government respond? Labor economist Catherine Ann Edwards has some great ideas about what to do and says we shouldn't wait to get started until an AI jobpocalypse. That's this week on Platformer. This podcast is brought to you by Atlassian Rovo, the AI that takes your team from AI novice to AI native. Welcome to Platformer. I'm Casey Newton. This week on the show, labor economist and Bloomberg opinion writer Catherine Ann Edwards joins us to discuss the current state of the U.S. economy and what we know, if anything, about early signs of AI disruption. It's a really great conversation. I think you're going to learn a lot from it. First, though, as always, we begin by checking in on the state of AI and jobs. And that means it's time to bring in Platformer fellow and Gen Z AI correspondent Ella Marquianos. Hey, Ella. Hi. How are you this week? I'm doing great. I just turned 24, which is very exciting. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. Exciting times. Yeah, I'm advancing in the years. You know, like in a year or two, you might need to replace me with a Gen Alpha AI correspondent as I become like washed, as we're all saying now. How old is the oldest Gen Alpha? Like, are they are they eligible to get a work permit? My memory is like perhaps 16, but I could be totally off base. All right, but they're definitely getting close if they're not there already. So we'll have to start looking into that. But in the meantime, you are in your absolute prime. And I'm hoping you have another one of your fascinating stories about the labor market to share with us this week. Yeah, so I have something. Normally, the statistics I look at with jobs are kind of depressing. Thankfully, I have some good news for at least some people this week, which is that people making chips, good news for the employees of both TSMC and Samsung. Basically, for the past few weeks, there has been a big issue where Samsung's labor union was threatening to go on strike because Samsung and its union couldn't agree on a pay deal. But Samsung has finally agreed on a deal, which is increasing bonuses for all employees. And their chip making group is getting an average $340,000 bonus, which is such a wild amount of money. And simultaneously, TSMC, also a big, one of the biggest chip makers in the world, is giving employees a 30% year over year increase in their profit sharing bonuses. Which is roughly in line with how they've kind of increased profit sharing relative to revenue over time, but it is notable that it's timed at the same time as this chip making development at Samsung. Yeah, well, so let's get into some of the details here. Like in the Samsung case, you say that they were getting ready to go on strike. What was behind the frustration there? Is this a case of, hey, ever since the AI boom started, you all have been printing money and you're not sharing that with us and we want our share? That was, yeah, that was like basically the situation there. Like currently, Samsung is like one of the most profitable companies in the world. It's making, you know, hundreds of, in Korean won, which is how a lot of this is measured, obviously, because it's making like hundreds of trillions of won in profit, which is, you know, that's like hundreds of billions of dollars, unless my mental calculation right now is totally messed up. Like they're in the top five most profitable companies in the world. And right now they're getting 7.3 trillion won in profit from like what you would think of as their classic business, which is like selling devices, like phones and TVs. And they're getting 310 trillion won in profit. So proportionately, like way more and like, you know, huge increases year over year in their semiconductors unit where they're selling chips. And so basically... So basically, like Samsung has become like a chip maker with a hobby in making Galaxy phones that sometimes explode on airplanes. Yeah, which is like, yeah, very like... I mean, this is like happening with a lot of companies. It like still feels bizarre at worlds to me. Like I really think of Samsung as like a phone company. Right. But things have changed. And now workers are saying, like, we're going to stop, we're not going to come in and make chips for you unless you give us a big pay raise. Is it... Should we be surprised that this works? Or is this just like why people form unions to begin with? Yeah, I would say, yeah, I would say, like my best read on this is like, in fact, this is why people form unions. Like the workers' abilities in this case are like incredibly important for Samsung. Samsung cannot afford to have their workers go on strike because in fact, the stuff that they're doing is making them a ton of money. And so like this, yeah, I think is like a pretty straightforward case of like why labor organizing works. At the same time, what we are seeing is very clear inequality in the pay increases between different departments within Samsung. So basically in the chips unit, some employees like the average bonus was about $340,000. Some, like it got up to about 400K, but some staff in, so like some memory unit employees were getting 600 million won bonuses, whereas some staff in non-chip areas were getting 6 million won, which is about $4,000 rather than $400,000 of their raises. And so people in non-chip divisions, like for example, people in the device experience division, which is like their phones, et cetera, are like quite, quite unhappy. And also Samsung has, because it's like such an enormous company, it has multiple unions negotiating together. And so the biggest union, which has a larger percentage of chip workers, about like greater than 80% of the members of this union voted for the deal, but there's a smaller Samsung union where only like 21% of people voted for the deal that represented people in more non-chip areas. And yeah, and there's some like very, yeah, there's just very strong pushback from some other areas of the company. Like the heads of the device experience department had to send this like letter apologizing to his employees, where like to me, it sounded like he himself was pretty pissed off about the treatment that his department was getting. I mean, obviously that's my read. Yeah, but I think that this is an important point because on the one hand, like this is one of the happier stories we've talked about on the show so far, right? Like workers are organizing and they're getting paid in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars just for the work that they're doing, but you have to be pretty closely tied to the actual chip making process in order to get that result. So it'll be interesting to see whether workers sort of organize further and try to maybe share the gains a little bit more broadly, or if this is going to be a phenomenon we mostly see at the companies who are the very closest to the technology. Yeah, and like also for now, you know, it's like Samsung and TSMC are giving these, their employees these bonuses where like companies that mostly sell software, like Meta or Microsoft, are laying people off so that they can buy like chips and AI compute like from these companies. So, you know, it's not really a case where like a rising tide lifts all boats. It's like because the demand is so disproportionately for AI, like that benefits people in some sectors, but it is not benefiting everyone in tech. All right. Well, another super interesting story. And as it so happens, Ella, unions do come up in the conversation that I'm about to have with Catherine Anne Edwards. So we will be right back with that for you after this break. Not sure how to actually use AI at work? Most AI tools promise to save time, but they sit outside your workflow. They're disconnected from how things actually get done. And they don't make your to-do list any shorter. Atlassian Rovo works where you work, across Jira, Confluence, and the rest of your stack, securely connected to your company's knowledge, context, and permissions. Turn meeting notes into Jira tickets. Draft campaign briefs in Confluence. Instantly find the right docs without digging. This isn't generic AI. This is AI that understands how your team actually works. Less searching, less busywork, more progress. That's what an AI-native team looks like. Learn more about Rovo at rovo.com. My guest today is Catherine Anne Edwards. She's a labor economist and independent policy consultant, and she writes a column for Bloomberg Opinion. She also co-hosts a podcast called Optimist Economy. And if you spend much time on econ social media, you've probably seen her there too. Catherine has spent her career on the less glamorous side of the jobs discussion, writing about unemployment insurance, what happens to people when they lose a job, poverty. But her real specialty is taking things that might look natural or inevitable and showing us that underneath, they're really just policy choices. So while our guests from Silicon Valley on the show have seen jobs change driven by technology, Catherine sees a more complicated labor market that's slowing down for reasons that often have nothing to do with AI. But they do still have a younger generation that feels squeezed by all of it. So she's not a doomer, but she's not a denialist either. She thinks a lot of the AI jobs panic is overblown, and she flat out rejects Sam Altman's notion of a permanently unemployed idle class, a story she finds not just wrong, but more than a little classist in how readily it writes off the intelligence of everyone who never had a knowledge work job. For Catherine, the real scandal is in government inaction, an unemployment insurance program designed Just because they didn't have a knowledge worker office job. That's one. And then two is, I'd be willing to take this exception that it's really, really special when it does something really, really special. That's one. And I don't mean that in an insulting way. I mean, like, what have we tangibly seen in our economy as a result of these LLMs, you know, being accessible through a subscription-based chatbot? Right. You're sort of bringing up what is sometimes called the solo paradox. Robert Solo, an economist, said in the 80s, you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. And I think a lot of economists in this moment feel that we're seeing something similar with AI, that it is everywhere, and yet when you look at the productivity statistics, it is not obvious that it is having a massive, measurable effect at this moment. Well, you went highbrow, I went lowbrow of like, it's teenage sex, right? Everyone's talking about it, no one's doing it. Right, yeah. Right. I guess, you know, I find in some ways this question itself to be a little bit distracting. I mean, what do you need to know, and why do you need to know it? If your concern is that there's going to be job loss, and therefore we need to have a better system for handling what could be a cascading layoffs, do you need to know how fast the technology has been adopted in the first three to four years? Do you need to know the exact number of people who have lost their job? Or is the problem the same regardless? I mean, will you act differently if it's 7 million people versus 7.5? If the answer is yes, then I really question whether or not you actually care about helping people who can be affected by job loss. And then I would also bring up, do you care about all the people who currently don't have a job that in many respects are larger than most of the projections of how many jobs will be lost to AI? Yeah. I want to get to questions about the safety net that we have and what will improve it a little bit later. But I want to spend a little bit more time looking at some of the announcements we've seen recently and some of the statistics that have been shared about the AI and jobs question. And just kind of get your take. You mentioned a bit earlier that some CEOs seem to be getting high on their own supply. We have recently heard companies... I might regret saying it exactly like that, but it's a podcast. I mean, I don't know that there's anything to regret there. I think probably a lot of our listeners will agree with you. In recent weeks, we've seen companies from Amazon to Salesforce citing AI as a reason behind layoffs, or at least a partial reason. As an economist, looking at the data, are there elements of those layoffs that you think can be properly attributed to AI? Or are people kind of trying to AI wash their layoffs and paper over maybe overhiring they did during the pandemic or the effect of high interest rates or like other factors? We don't know. We might never know. And honestly, the company themselves might not know. You can have complex motivations for actions you take as a large employer. And whatever you say about it, it could be... Rarely do actions like that have a single determinant. So it could be that it is feeling very optimistic about the effect AI will have on your workforce and that you could go forward with a leaner staff and that also you felt like you overhired in the pandemic and also the economy has been plagued with uncertainty, especially economic policy uncertainty over the last two years, and it would just be nice to be leaner anyway, so you have a little less risk going through a volatile economic period. All of those things could be true. And then when you make the press release, you say, we've adopted AI because that has the largest remuneration in the stock market for your shareholders to say that you're adopting AI. I think what economists will do is we will look at specific occupations, specific industries, occupations within industries, and we will look for changes that are either apart from the overall trend or dramatically different than their past trend. So saying, so making the claim like, lots of young people are having a hard time finding a job right now and therefore AI, I don't think we would make that claim because, you know, at the same time is not the same thing as cause and effect. Before and after, also not the same thing as cause and effect. We would look for very specific casualties within employment and also within job postings. Those are much less definitive right now about the effect of AI and jobs. And they were, you know, I was coming to the conclusion that if you looked at software development job postings, they were down relative to postings overall, but then a few months ago they surpassed it and they were higher again. A lot of the industries that were trying to look at very closely, they tend to be a little bit more volatile to begin with. I mean, tech, even 15 years ago, tech is an industry that eats its young, right? A new technology comes along and they'll, you know, they'd prefer to lay people off and hire young people that know how to use the new version, the new programming language, rather than training old people. So it's a very hard industry in general to focus on, to look for job loss and obsolescence because that's kind of the name of the game in tech. They are an industry that tends to not employ people broadly as much over the age of 50, right? They prefer to hire lots of young people who know the new shiny thing. So looking for job loss within industries and occupations that have kind of long-term high turnover anyway, it's tough. Well, let's try to zoom out a little bit then. In May, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that employment in 18 occupations that are considered exposed to AI declined by 0.2%, while employment rose 0.8% everywhere else. Is that the kind of statistic that makes you think, okay, now we're starting to understand something that is really happening? Or is it just another confounding variable? I mean, it's illustrative, but not definitive. I think you have to ask yourself, is there another reason why an occupation exposed to AI could be experiencing slower than average job growth? Well, if the funding model of those companies is reliant on investments and interest rates might be poised to rise again, it could be that they're wary about taking on more headcount in an area in which they're not profitable to begin with. So it's not necessarily ruling out that explanation that AI is causing job loss so much as leaving in everything that can't be eliminated. I see. But again, I genuinely believe that AI is already causing job loss. Just like I genuinely believe AI is already causing job growth. And I think people are looking to economists to say, but what's the right number? What's the exact level? Can we pinpoint it? And I think economists are kind of putting back, we don't know it. What do you need to know in order to make a conclusion? And what do you want that conclusion to serve? I mean, one conclusion I think people are looking for is basically, is the rate of AI job creation higher than the rate of AI job loss? Or like, what is the relationship between those two things? But is that also something that we just kind of don't know yet? Again, like, it's going to be hard to know ever. I mean, you can go back and look at... I mean, what's a big technology? I mean, the internet. That certainly changed the way we did our jobs. Microsoft Office changed the way that we did our jobs. Computers changed the way we did our jobs. But you're not going to find many reliable estimates of like, this was the total job loss and job creation from computers entering the US workforce. Or like, this is how the internet changed employment in the US. I mean, you could cut... I'm sure there are people who have come up with a number, but it would be very like... I mean, I'm sure the number would be one paragraph and the caveats to that number would be 10 pages because it's very hard to do. I think they're the people who have, I have heard, so this is now me caveating that I don't know if this is how other people would interpret it. But in my assessment, the people who have been loudest about AI creating some type of permanent obsolescence in an idle class is all coming from AI founders themselves. Right. And on that point, there is a view in Silicon Valley and it is most loudly espoused by the AI CEOs that eventually the models will get good enough that people will just hire less. My sense is that you are just skeptical of this, that it's hard to imagine reaching that point. It's not... Okay, so you are able to run a shop with fewer people overall because those people are able to use AI. That will happen. I believe that will happen absolutely. It's whether or not... It's the next step that I think kind of makes their prior claim look ridiculous in hindsight because then you say, well, people who run technology shops that use AI will need two workers instead of 10 or 20 workers instead of 200. And therefore, we will have tens of millions of permanently unemployed people. Like, it's the conclusion that they're drawing from the adoption of technology that you have to separate out of... I mean, I believe the first thing. I'm sure the first thing will happen. That's what happened to manufacturing workers. And, you know, you can think of people making shoes in 1905 and 2005 and 2105. And how many people are you going to think are going to be in the factory in, you know, 80 years? Not many. How many were there in 1905? It wasn't about the type of job that was lost. It was that people didn't have income. And that's what you respond to, the person and not the former employer. Right. Well, let me come at the question from another angle, which you referenced a little bit earlier, which is about entry-level workers, right? Another place where there's a lot of attention right now. The Dallas Fed found recently that employment in the most AI-exposed sectors is down about 1% since late 2022 and that workers under 25 have been hit the hardest, not through layoffs, but because they believe entry-level jobs simply aren't being created in the first place. And I'm curious what you think the implications might be of AI's impact being felt more through jobs that never appear as opposed to people being laid off. Yeah, I mean, it definitely makes a lot more intuitive sense that I start to use a chatbot and my workers are more productive and so I don't have to expand my headcount in order to expand my business. And so I just don't hire. That makes more sense to me. I think it's quite intuitive to people. But again, it's not, how do I say this? It is not as if the economy is otherwise perfect. There is a lot going on in our economy and labor market right now that are much more influential on the youth labor market than AI. So AI could be having an effect on entry-level work for people in specific occupations that would seem redundant with AI, but that is not the majority of young people and that is not the largest force in our economy. In the spring of 2022, the Federal Reserve started raising interest rates. The labor market peaked after the pandemic about three months later and it has been falling since. Now it was at such an extraordinarily strong place that that fall hasn't been high enough to really trigger a recession. But it looks like one. We've seen a drop off in hiring. We've seen a drop off in wage growth. We've seen a drop off in job openings and in quits. The labor market is slowing down. When the labor market slows down, there are certain things that happen in the labor market and one of them is called upskilling, that when you have a lot of people applying for jobs and you're an employer and you have more demand for a specific position, you can require more from it. We saw this a lot during the Great Recession. You know, you had people, you had companies that had like same job, same title, different labor markets, and they, you know, suddenly the job needed a master's degree. Suddenly the job needed three years' experience. The idea of an entry-level job isn't just that it can be lost to AI, but it can be lost in a labor market where suddenly employers have the upper hand when hiring because so many people are looking for work that they can demand more skills and experience for the same job. That's called upskilling. We see the opposite thing happen when the labor market gets really tight. It's called downskilling, where now the job might not even require a college degree. Now, I'm referring to it as like one single job just to kind of explain how upskilling and downskilling work, but really it would be across jobs. You'd see upskilling move up, downskilling move down. So the youth unemployment rate is by no means at a record high For college workers with a college degree or not, but the labor market's kind of typical movement has started to slow and so we would expect upskilling to occur. Young workers with not, I mean, I hate to say this so bluntly, but because they don't know how to do anything, they're not going to be the first ones to get hired because I can get someone with more education or more experience on the cheap because the labor market is weak. So they, now typically, I think what's special about right now is that that youth getting hit typically happens after a recession. They're kind of like a lagging victim of recessions. They suffer the, like, they tend to, like, their labor market pain kind of extends beyond the rest of the labor market. They take a long time to recover. This time, it's almost as if it's preceding one. And rather than being a kind of a lagging indicator of labor market weakness, they're a leading one. That can happen. I mean, it's happening right now, but it's labor market weakness would explain almost everything you see going on with young people and AI might explain some of it for some of them. You, you do a lot of sort of like great public service explaining of these forces on social media. I imagine you may be hearing from young people who are saying, okay, I understand this is the situation. What should I do? And I'm curious what advice you give someone who's young and might not know anything quite yet. I say with love and affection, you know, I try to, I try to just, I guess in some ways, lower expectations. And when you come out of school, you have been part of a pipeline that is path dependent and high stakes almost since you were in high school, right? You have to do well on this test to do well in this class, to get this grade, to get this GPA, to get into this school. And then you have to do well in that class and on that essay and on that test to get that GPA to get into that job. And everything is set up as you have to succeed, you have to succeed, you have to succeed. The labor market is not like that. The labor market is lots of movement, lots of experimentation. You go to a job and you don't like it and it's not as if you'll never work again. You just pack up and you go to another one. It is a very abrupt transition for a lot of young people in both the pressure they put on the first job that they get, as well as kind of acclimating themselves to the freedom of movement that they should take advantage of in the labor market. Movement is associated with better job matches. Movement is associated with better income. Movement is associated with like more satisfaction. Like you've got to find the thing you like to do. You will not find it when you're a freshman in high school or a freshman in college. So I try to say all of that to say, if you can't find your first job, it is not like going to condemn you to a worse life. It's awful right now to not find a job, especially after working so hard and almost all of it building up to, if you do all these things, then you'll be secure in the labor market. And then to be met with a brick wall, that's insecurity in the labor market is so cruel. But in some ways, you've been kind of built up too much. Like this is just your first job. Most people won't like their first job. They'll leave their first job and then they'll figure out what they really want to do through experience. You know, don't write yourself off. Like try to keep a little bit of a, not necessarily a level head, try to keep a little bit of like, Maybe like a long-term perspective. Yeah, like lower the pressure of like, okay, like this didn't work out, but if you talk to people who are, say, 40 to 50 years old, very few of them have the career that their first job would have predicted. And so that, I try to say that not to make it seem better. Like, it's okay, you don't find one, but like it is okay that you, that it takes you a while. It can hurt now, but you, you won't, I don't know. I love the point that you're making because I think, you know, what I remember from my high school and college days was it felt like you are like in training to become an X, you know? It's like, you're going to do all of these things. And then at the end of it, you will be like a doctor or a lawyer or a carpenter or an electrician. And what I hear you saying is the reality for most people is that there's just a lot more kind of thrashing and flux. And if you allow yourself to roll with the punches a little bit, you may find that, you know, you will sort of calm down about these things over time. It's not as if someone's handing you that doctor or lawyer job when you walk off the stage at college graduation, the path is going to be a little bit more uncertain. And uncertainty can come from a lot of places in the labor market for young workers. Right now, it's coming from a weak labor market, but that's not the only thing that have affected young people over time. And I, I had a, I was asked in an interview by, you know, a young person who was making a news show for, that was intended for young people. And he, he said that something that makes young people really upset is that there's not a measure of underemployment, of people taking jobs that are below their education. And this is, you know, people who would get out of college and then have to go work at like Starbucks or work at the Apple store because they can't find a job. And I told him, even if we collected that data, it wouldn't be informative because for the vast majority of people, a lot of them do have education that they don't use in their job. And it doesn't mean that there's a problem in the labor market. It really just means that the labor market is mobile and they don't want to use that specific educational experience in their career anymore, but that doesn't make them a failure. And I brought up that I have a PhD in economics and I am no longer in a research position. I mean, I, my main job now is to be a columnist for Bloomberg and hosting a podcast. So by this type of measure of having education that you don't specifically need for the job that you have, I would also A kind of like simplistic idea, maybe, in the sense that like one of the suggestions that you make is, well, like maybe government should help people move. You know, like if you're not physically in an area where a job is, maybe the government could get you there. And I read that, I thought, that sounds so reasonable to me. I never heard it proposed before. But like it actually seemed quite logical. And like maybe that would be better in some ways than, you know, like a one-time cash payment of $10,000. I think the real problem in our economy, the real problem in our labor market often is power. So is giving universal basic income under the guise that some people have lost their job, is that giving power to workers or is that buying them off? I think that, you know, the AI gurus who are proponents of UBI see it as a way to buy them off. I think that some people who have been involved with UBI for a lot longer than that see that as a way to distribute power. I see it as an inefficient way to distribute power and we ought to attack power structures directly. Things like having a decent unemployment system so that you're not so beholden to employers and have the power to find a good job or retrain for a job or move across the country. So what I know about a long-term unemployment system is that you get a lot of this, like, oh, train people and like wave of a hand of like, just train people, be plumbers. We need electricians. When in fact, a long-term unemployment program would do things like help people start small businesses, help people move into entrepreneurship, help people go back for preparation for occupations that are actually in deep shortage, like nursing and teaching. And it could do things like pay people to move. You know, and so those change kind of... I think what I hear in the background is like, no one's talking, but I can hear someone say, like the government can't do that well. Cash can't do it perfectly. So I will put my policy belief on the idea that cash won't change fundamental power structures, especially if it's doled out kind of at the largest of very wealthy people. So I'm much more of a believer in the worker, you know, asserting their own future as opposed to being cash dependent on the wealthiest who decide to give them some, even if it's through the tax system. I also will say for the record that my biggest suspicion of UBI comes from the fact that I think that most people who are proponents of it, if you go down one layer, think that that means you don't need any other program. Like if you have UBI, you don't need Medicaid. If you have UBI, we don't need food assistance. That's the other kind of lurking, like crouching tiger hidden dragon objection. But just even on face value, UBI doesn't change power imbalance in our economy or address market failure. I think that's a good thing to keep our eye on. When I hear folks in the AI world talk about UBI, one thing I think it reflects is an anxiety about the risk that AI will consolidate a lot of power and wealth into like a very small number of companies. And they know that there is going to be pressure to sort of do something about that, right? Like if, you know, we've heard some skepticism today about whether they can get to the point that they are racing toward. But assuming they're able to get even partway there, I mean, frankly, just like a lot of people are going to be very mad at them. And you can see that people already are mad at them. Look at all of the polling that we have about AI in America in 2026. People generally do not like it. Which leads me to the question of like, do these companies or might they in the future have any responsibility to workers that they might displace? Like it does seem like governments will be in the best position to do something about this. But I'm curious if you have any thoughts about like whether there is a role for the industry to play here in some of these transitions that may be coming. I... No. I wouldn't want to empower them or make future economic policy or principles dependent on them. I think some of it is a practical concern. If you make someone pay for something in a targeted way that's a company, they will get out of it. And, you know, they'll be quite slippery in doing so. But I think the... I mean, the anxiety they feel, it's not as if they're in favor of a higher corporate income tax rate or they didn't fight for the corporate income tax rate to be lowered. It's not as if they're out there saying, hey, you should probably change the estate tax so we personally benefit less. Like they want to come up with a solution that preserves their wealth but makes people less mad at them. And they're looking to PR companies to fill in the gaps when in fact, the solutions we need are the ones that we have that we're not using because they've been so disempowered. You have a concentration in wealth and companies? Well, thank God we have an antitrust act. You should probably break them up. They're all monopolies anyway or close to it. You know, you're worried about the concentration of wealth? Well, this is why God invented the estate tax and the corporate income tax. These things have been weakened over time by those very people who are then telling us that they need to do something to make people less mad about them as they have a concentration of wealth. So that, fine, we have ways to deal with that. I think, I don't, I mean, if they hadn't given so much to Trump's inauguration or his ballroom, I might feel differently about their concerns and think that it comes from a genuine place. But I don't see them lining up about the policy that we know will work. Like, they're out there searching for a policy that suits their own needs when we have policies that work that they have, you know, basically like taken out at the knee and don't want to get back up again. Right, right. So I, you know, we, we had incredible concentration of wealth in the Gilded Age that got, you know, busted up through breaking up of monopolies and through the empowering of workers of unions. And so much evidence, so much evidence out there exists on what helped the middle class make so much money was unionization. I don't really see any of these guys out there saying maybe we should have unionization in our own workforce as, let alone other workforces. I talked to someone who's a real, you know, he's just a real absolute pro-union economist. And he said what strikes him about AI is this, a lot of the workplace policy. Like, can companies surveil you using AI? Can they, can they use AI to, and try to get someone to do your exact job and use your work and train you and then fire you and not pay you for it? That the government looking after this would be hard. Legislating around it would be hard. But it wouldn't be hard if the workplace had a union to bargain for each case as it came up. And I thought that that was a really prescient point. People are opposed to unionization for so many bad reasons and not the good one, which is that it gives workers a lot more power and money. So I, I, I can understand wanting to find a solution that is convenient for the people who sit at the concentration of wealth and power and employment. Um, but I don't need a new one. Right. And you know, it's really interesting. I don't know if you've been following what's been going on at Samsung in South Korea, where there is a union that has been very concerned about the, the way that the wealth of the company is not filtering down to, to workers at the rate that the workers there believe it should. And so they threatened to go on strike and lo and behold, Samsung found more money to pay them. So, um, we've already seen a really powerful example of a tech union changing the terms for the better for them through that sort of collective action. Right, which, and like, and that's the nightmare, right? Right. It's the solution and the nightmare. It's the thing that we know will work. It'll help remunerate power and income back to workers. It'll help them have more power on the job for how AI can show up in all kinds of insidious ways, not just when you start using the chatbot, but what it does. You know, these are empowering workers via a union. You know, it till, it's put your thumb on the scale for the worker and not the, the manager. That's not a solution that any of them are exactly like running towards. Um, I mean, same thing with the corporate income tax. Corporate profits are at century highs and the labor share of income, just how much of the economy is going to workers for their job, is at absolute lows. So we've never seen corporations make so much money and never seen workers make so little money relative to the size of the economy. I mean, we're at basically like 1929 levels. Terrible year to be associated with for economic purposes. I mean, so, we did cut the corporate income tax rate. So if I wanted corporate profits to be lower, I have a really easy way to do that. It's called the corporate income tax. You know, they're not exactly out there on the streets saying you need to raise the corporate income tax immediately. Right, right. Even though a very high corporate income tax that was fairly distributed without quite so many loopholes or deductions or credits or adjustments or write-offs, right, it was very good at its job. It kept corporate profits at a reasonable level and workers ended up making more money. Just because these things... I mean, there are people, I should say that there are people out there who will tell you You know, we, you know, Social Security is broken, but of course, we did know that 35 years ago and have done nothing to fix it. So I take a lot of comfort in knowing of like, hey, the lowest bar is the greatest source of optimism because I would feel very differently if we had tried anything. What we have tried for the past 25 years is the experiment. Are tax cuts the solution to every economic problem we have? And the answer we are left with is no, they are not. And we've had nine pieces of tax legislation over the past 25 years. It's $13 trillion that we have spent towards tax cuts. And if you can't afford housing, if you can't afford food, if you can't afford healthcare, if you can't afford transportation, if you can't afford childcare, and if you can't afford eldercare, maybe we have all we need to know that tax cuts aren't going to solve those problems because if they were going to solve those problems, they should have been doing it sometime over the past 25 years. We've made a massive investment in a single economic policy that has not borne fruit other than making our country indebted because we've been financing permanent reductions in revenue via our debt. So let's not do that anymore. It's not accomplishing what we wanted to accomplish. So now let's go do other things. And I will feel differently and maybe in 25 years I will come out with like the less-optimistic economy because we've done everything. We've done all of these things. And then they didn't work. Then I think I would be like reasonably concerned economist, reasonably concerned economy. That would be the next podcast. But it's got to come after all this stuff gets out the door and has a good like 10 years to sit. And then I will do it. I think one thing you asked that I didn't talk about directly is how are we going to pay for all of this? You know, the U.S. government has an incredible tax power that it has made weak with little to show for it. But that means that we could raise taxes and have little to lose from it. And the inverse of having $13 trillion in tax cuts have almost nothing to point to in terms of real tangible wins in our economy means that you could claw back some of those tax cuts and not risk much to our economy. I think there's lots of ways to do it. We we have 271 credits, deductions and adjustments through the personal and corporate income tax codes. So let's get that down to like 150. Let's whittle that down and make the tax code simpler. We can change the estate tax cutoff. Right now you're not taxed for inherited wealth. This is dynastic wealth, right? You're not taxed on it if you have $30 million. The first $30 million of your inheritance is not taxed. Wow. $30 million. It used to be $1 million. And now it's $30 million. So you're first. And then if you are taxed, it's only on after the first $30 million. So that's that we can change. And I feel fairly confident that people could inherit even $10 million of wealth tax-free, and we would still have an economy, but also some revenue to show for it. And I think my my strongest policy belief is that we should lower the estate tax exemption. I actually think it should be closer to around five and we should use all the proceeds from it for a children's trust fund to dedicate to investing in children who don't inherit $5 million. Well, you have given us so many great ideas today, Catherine, and I hope that your conversations with Congress and Hill staffers bear fruit because I'm with you. There are lots of great policies out there and I think it's time we started to try them. Can I just say one thing? Yeah. Yeah. I know my job here. I am the bucket of cold water on AI and the you know, the euphoria around it. But that's not because I don't believe AI is special or different or remarkable or that it's not, it doesn't represent, you know, truly human progress. That's it's not because of any of those things, but it's because we have a really big economy and it's not just ever going to be AI. And other things matter more than shaping our entire policy future around the latest shiny tech. No matter how special I think it is, we have to put workers and the economy first and not morph everything we do around a technology as cool as it may be. Catherine, thank you so much for joining us. Cheers. Platformer is produced by Lindsey Chu and edited by Fitz Harris at Story & Sound. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at YouTube.com slash Casey Newton. My email is Casey at platformer.news, and we'll see you next week. Take your team from AI novice to AI native with Atlassian RoVo. Go to rovo.com to learn more today.