What Do People Do All Day?

If you drive north-northeast out of New York City, you hit Connecticut, and if you keep going north on Route 8 for a while, you get to the little town of Winsted. Stay right at the fork, and you’ll come upon an old brick warehouse. It used to be part of a factory that made woolens and knitwear — including, as legend has it, the long baseball socks worn by the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. But the factory closed many years ago. And the warehouse today is a museum, called the American Mural Project. It is a tribute to the American worker, and it took more than 20 years to build; it was a collaboration between artists, schoolkids, a few celebrities, and all kinds of workers. At the museum, they will tell you that 15,000 people helped create this project. But really, it’s the work of one woman:

Ellen GRIESEDIECK: My name is Ellen Griesedieck and, what do I do? I’m an artist, and people tell me I’m the president of this organization now.

Full disclosure: Ellen is an old friend of mine; she lives near here, along with her husband Sam Posey, an architect and former racecar driver. They are two of the nicest and most interesting people I know. Ellen is a painter who started out as a sports photographer: she shot NASCAR races and 24 Hours of Le Mans; she shot Bjorn Borg and Billie Jean King; and many others. She was famous for spending a lot of time with her subjects, for really getting her nose in things. And sometimes they put their nose in her things. Like that time she was with Muhammad Ali at his training camp in rural Pennsylvania.

GRIESEDIECK: I stayed a couple of weeks at Deer Lake. Muhammad’s talking to me in between sparring, we were out at a woodpile and it was still dark, we’d had the run — and he said, “What are you going to do with all these photos and paintings and stuff?” and I said, “Ah, I don’t know.” He says, “You’ve got to think hard about how to do something with this that really can affect kids, can make a difference to how kids grow up and think about what they want to do.” And I thought that was like, “Whoa, okay, that’s a big assignment.” 

She ended up taking the big assignment.

GRIESEDIECK: I’m interested in people. As an artist, I’m not going to say, “Oh god, look at that lovely sunset. I want to do something about that.” I’m going to see Bob on the West Side Highway up on a beam, see what he’s doing and go, “Oh I got to paint this.”

And she kept painting people — people in their workplace. It helped that she is able to talk herself into places that most of us can’t. Like the Boeing airplane factory in Everett, Washington.

GRIESEDIECK: The first thing that happens when you walk into this space is, it’s so enormous. If you think the 747 is amazing as an airplane, take it apart and you have all these little guys running around. People ride to their workstations on bikes. It is outrageous.  

One Boeing worker in particular caught her eye. 

GRIESEDIECK: He is the only guy who puts engines on 747s, with his team. I said, “What happens if you’re sick?” And he said, ‘They don’t put engines on.” And when you see him up there with his team — which is about 22 minutes to put an engine on a 747 —  it’s something almost religious. You’re looking up 30 feet, and you see this thing come across the room, and you see it’s on chains and all this stuff, and these six guys hit it, and — 

Stephen DUBNER: What do you mean by six guys “hit it”?

GRIESEDIECK: Land on it with lifts and everything, and they secure it. I was like, “I can’t believe what I just saw. How am I going to paint that? What am I going to do?” Because I want other people to have the experience I’m having.

Over time, she decided she would build a place where that experience could be had. After a couple decades of work and planning, the American Mural Project opened to the public in 2022. Muhammad Ali would be happy to know there are a lot of school field trips and after-school programs. The mural itself is a sprawling storyboard, oversized depictions of workers at work. Ellen walked us around.

GRIESEDIECK: Let me just show you. Here’s where we are. So this is the mural.

DUBNER: Start upper left. That guy.  

GRIESEDIECK: That’s Bob. He’s an ironworker. I’ve been up on that beam with him. 

DUBNER: Next to him?

GRIESEDIECK: Those two women are in charge of doing all the wiring in the 747 in the upper fourth quadrant. Look at the crap of wires that you have to somehow know where they go, what they do. 

DUBNER: Who’s this guy? 

GRIESEDIECK: He’s a foundry worker at River Rouge Ford. They’re making Mustangs over there. These guys — that was so much fun. Those Mustangs are going down the assembly line, and it runs on a track.

DUBNER: Okay, then these three guys. What are — 

GRIESEDIECK: These guys are mechanics on the biggest land-moving tractors you’ve ever seen. That’s in New Mexico.

DUBNER: Who’s the farmer? 

GRIESEDIECK: Scott is the farmer, and Nina is milking the cow. They work together on a dairy farm that is right opposite our house.

Most of the jobs in this mural have two things in common: they require a lot of physical labor; and they are the kind of jobs that have been disappearing in recent decades. And that is the reason for our visit today. I recently came across an interesting paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It’s called “New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018.” The paper shows that around 60 percent of the jobs that people do today in the U.S. didn’t exist in 1940. David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., is one of the authors of that paper.

David AUTOR: Does that mean we have, you know, 40 percent fewer types of work? The answer is no, because we have all these people in software, or in pediatric oncology and flight, geriatric services, things that we didn’t even think about 100 years ago.  We used to have 40 percent of all employment in agriculture, at the turn of the 20th century. Now we have under 2 percent. That was a technological phenomenon. You can find many, many cases of where we automate ourselves out of work. But we’re constantly thinking of new things to desire, new services to offer, new goods, and products. And a lot of that is stuff we couldn’t previously do.

Today on Freakonomics Radio: what do people today do all day? I mean that literally: if you are a sustainability consultant or a chief listening officer or a Scrum Master, what do you actually do?

Paula BARMAIMON: It’s kind of nerve-wracking, I will be honest.

We also ask what happens as work becomes more digital, and less physical.

James SUZMAN: Modern efficiency has robbed us of that profound satisfaction that comes from baking a loaf of bread, digging a hole in the garden, going fishing.  

And: when we think about work, are we really just thinking about Busytown?

Huck SCARRY: Stitches bought an eggbeater so that his family could make fudge. Brrrrrrrrr. Try not to get any on your new clothes, kids!

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Okay, let’s get back to David Autor, at M.I.T.

AUTOR: I’m a labor economist, and I work on things that affect earnings, wages, skill demands, opportunities. 

We’ve had Autor on the show a couple times before. In an episode about automation called “How to Stop Worrying and Love the Robot Apocalypse.” In an episode called “Did China Eat America’s Jobs?” Autor himself has had more jobs than most academics, and different jobs.

AUTOR: I did a lot of work in fast food. I spent a month working at McDonalds and half a year working at Papa Gino’s, which is a pizza franchise in the Boston area. I did a lot of blue-collar work. I also worked as a temp. I did, you know, light construction and cleaning. I did software development for a while, and I also spent several years directing a nonprofit in San Francisco that did computer education for the poor. I also fix cars and motorcycles and electronics. 

It would surprise none of his peers if David Autor were to win a Nobel prize. His research is very well-regarded, and he’s considered an honest broker, not the kind of academic researcher whose work can feel like advocacy. He recently co-chaired an M.I.T. task force on the future of work, and the Economist magazine has called him “the academic voice of the American worker.” I wanted to speak with Autor about that recent paper of his, which found that 60 percent of today’s jobs didn’t exist in 1940. His co-authors were the economists Caroline Chin, Anna Salomons, and Bryan Seegmiller.

AUTOR: So we are actually building on work by Jeff Lin, who’s an economist at the Philadelphia Fed Reserve Bank. And what he noticed is that the Census Bureau, every decade — you know they collect the Census, they ask you what your industry and occupation is, and that’s not a bubble form — you just write it in. And if you write it in, that means that someone has to classify it into a category. But people can write in all kinds of crazy stuff. And so they create these volumes, these classified indices, where you might say, “Well, I’m a surgical-brace technician.” And they say, “Oh, ‘healthcare specialist, not elsewhere classified.’”

But over time, those unclassified subcategories can get classified.

AUTOR: And as they see it in more and more entries, they start filling out this volume. So different subspecialties are added every decade. Now, it’s a lot messier than it sounds. But we got an enumeration of new work, and that’s how we measured it. 

DUBNER: So your team here, can you just give me a sense of how long this took? What was the scope of work?

AUTOR: This project took five years. It was a huge measurement project because it wasn’t actually just measuring the new titles, but also measuring the innovations that affected them. We wanted to distinguish between innovations that automate, that basically execute the tasks that are inputs into a job, versus innovations that augment, meaning they increase the quality or variety of specialized work that people can produce in their occupations. And so we used a big machine learning system to try to distinguish those categories. And what we wanted to show was that — or at least hoped to be able to establish — was that innovation had multiple faces, and there were certainly innovations that were just displacing work — reducing the number of workers, and simplifying jobs. And there are other innovations that seem to be creating new demands for complementary expertise, that were leading to employment growth and wage growth. And these are often happening in the same place. 

DUBNER: Can you give an example of each of those, please? 

AUTOR: So a good example is, we found patents that essentially created permanent-press clothing, and they were negative for dry cleaners. And then we saw other patents that enabled people to do more efficient typesetting and editing, and that had multiple faces. On the one hand, it speeds up the work, so maybe you need fewer people. On the other hand, it demands more specialized knowledge. 

“Specialized knowledge” comes in many forms. Just look at the new job titles Autor and his team came across in the Census data. In 1950: “tattooer.” In 1980, “hypnotherapist.” In 1990, “conference planner.”

AUTOR: Some of it’s, you know, bull**** titles, right? You go from “greeter” to “customer relations manager.” But some of that specialization is not because jobs are getting narrower, but because they’re getting deeper. You have oncologists, and all of a sudden you have a pediatric oncologist. That’s not just because as a favor, they gave someone a new title. It’s because someone specialized in pediatric oncology. Medicine’s a great example, because the frontier of medical knowledge is so deep and so wide that no one can be the master of all of it, and hence we have to specialize. 

DUBNER: Talking about specialization in medicine, it just makes me wonder — when you look at this whole universe of data that you’re starting to describe now, we read often that healthcare comprises about 18 percent of G.D.P. in the U.S. Do we see a relatively tight relationship between the share of G.D.P. of a general sector, and the growth or fall of jobs? 

AUTOR: Yes. Generally, sectors that have a larger share of G.D.P. are growing, and healthcare is a very large employer at this point. It’s also the case that the growing sectors have more types of new work. So, for example, when manufacturing declines as a result of the China trade shock, not only do we see a decline in the number of workers, but we also see a slowdown in the creation of new types of work, of new specialty. And conversely, when we all of a sudden start making investments in the electrical grid, all of a sudden you find new occupations like solar plumbers and solar electricians. Those are people, you know, they’re plumbers and electricians who started specializing in solar installations. And that’s a real skill. They made up the title for themselves initially, but eventually it becomes a specialty. 

In the Census data they examined, Autor and his colleagues found that many of the new jobs in the 1940s were in mechanical work and office work — jobs like carburetor man and speedometer repairman; jobs like letter-opener operator and check-writing-machine operator. And these jobs tended to pay relatively well. But around 1980, there was a shift in the new kinds of jobs, and there was the beginning of a split.

AUTOR: A lot of these things in the last 50 years have become rather bifurcated. Many of them are in the professional, technical, and managerial, highly educated occupations, and then many of them are in personal services: caring for the elderly, in manicuring, or entertainment activities, or even, like, mall gardener. And those, unfortunately, tend not to be as highly paid. Although the new work may be somewhat better paid than the other work within that same occupation, the growth of personal services has not been an altogether positive thing for the labor market. Better than it not growing, but it’s growing in place of a lot of the manufacturing and office work that was around earlier. That work was more specialized, required more expertise, and therefore tended to pay somewhat better. And we find some evidence, although I think it’s much more tentative, that this pace of automation has accelerated relative to the pace of new work creation.  

DUBNER: If you look at it overall, with all those components, how would you describe this change in the last 80, 100 years, comparing with, I guess, any other point in history? 

AUTOR: These last 80 years have been the most extraordinary in human history for innovation. Our standards of living have risen so fast, it’s almost impossible to have an adequate perspective. 

To be fair, we might not expect a modern labor economist to have an adequate perspective on something as complicated as The. History. Of. Work. So who might have that perspective?

SUZMAN: Work has always in some ways defined what people do, certainly since the agricultural revolution.

That is James Suzman. He is an anthropologist who spent time in academia, and now writes books. He also once held a very unlikely corporate job, which we’ll hear about later. Today, he splits time between Cambridge, England; a farmhouse in France; and the Kalahari Desert, in southern Africa, where he’s been doing fieldwork for years.

SUZMAN: I’ve been working with Bushmen since the early 1990s. The principal reason I went there was, I was a student in Saint Andrews in Scotland, and we had the opportunity to undertake fieldwork as part of our undergraduate degrees. And Scotland is bloody miserable and cold. And so I thought what is the hottest possible place I could go to. The Kalahari Desert came to mind. And when I got there, I discovered I got on well with the Bushmen. But there was also another motivation behind it, which was that I grew up as a South African. Southern Africa was in a period of great transition at the time. Apartheid was ending, lives were changing fast, and I wished very much to be part of that. The Bushmen were a highly marginalized community within that process. So, I became very focused on working with them. 

DUBNER: I’ve heard that phrase forever — ”Bushmen of the Kalahari” — but I have no idea who they are, where they are, what they do. Can you give us a quick description? 

SUZMAN: The Bushmen of the Kalahari are the direct descendants of the original Homo sapiens that lived in southern Africa from around 300,000 years ago. It’s a very dry area, and it was largely unattractive to farmers because it’s a desert. So the Bushmen are often regarded, or were regarded, as the sort of sine qua non of a contemporary hunting-and-gathering society that offered potential insights into the way Stone Age ancestors lived.  

DUBNER: And how much of that culture is still extant? 

SUZMAN: Look, cultures are continuously dynamic and changing things. And the world has changed dramatically for pretty much everybody, everywhere. In places like the Kalahari over the last 50 years, hunting and gathering as a primary way of making a living has effectively disappeared.

DUBNER: So when you started going there, what kind of work were they doing? 

SUZMAN: When I started working with them, they’d been forcibly evicted from most of their land, which had been stolen by big cattle ranchers. They were then forced to work on — at the time it was mainly Afrikaner-owned farms, where they’d be living in fairly miserable circumstances. They work incredibly long, hard hours for very little reward indeed. They had a series of obvious questions about this: why do we work so hard when the rewards are so slim? If this is progress, if this is what becoming part of the great dominant economy is, then why are we so much worse off than we were before? Why do we have so much less leisure time? Why are we so much worse-nourished than we were?

DUBNER: And did you have any answers for them?

SUZMAN: I didn’t have answers for them. That’s what shaped many of the questions I’ve pursued in my working life.

Suzman’s most recent book is called Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. Let’s start with the Stone Age, and the hunter-gatherer economy.

SUZMAN: Hunter-gatherers organize their economies in fundamentally different ways. The most fundamental of those was that they did not accept the principle of scarcity. They did not assume that all resources were inherently scarce. Rather, they assumed that the world was an inherently generous place, that the environment was inherently provident, and that effectively they didn’t have to go out and — you know, as a hunter-gatherer, the approach to securing the food that you need to eat, the food is already produced, in effect, by the environment. And so it’s a process of going out and harvesting it. Even in a place like the Kalahari Desert, which looks utterly barren, and bereft of anything edible, to a skilled forager, it’s full of stuff. In a really good wet season, it’s like living in a massive Walmart. You simply just go and pick up whatever you want when you feel like it. They did not think far into the future, because they didn’t need to. When you went and hunted, you didn’t hunt for six weeks, if you could kill six elephants and try to store the meat — actually, all the meat would waste. So, people tended to feed themselves spontaneously, and they had what anthropologists would call an immediate-return economy, where short term needs were easily and quickly satisfied.  

DUBNER: Based on actual evidence — and I have no idea what evidence would be, going that far back — how satisfied was someone living that life, and how did their work contribute to that satisfaction? 

SUZMAN: My sense of it, based on recent and contemporary hunting and gathering societies, was that life had a very high level of satisfaction. There was not a kind of existential angst, which I think is a source of great dissatisfaction. These societies also, it’s worth pointing out, were on the whole extremely egalitarian. So, for example, the Ju/’hoansi absolutely refused to accept anybody’s leadership, and a whole series of social rules about sharing responsibilities and sharing resources — kept the society on a very even keel. Even to the extent that productive hunters tend to — you know, if you showed up back at the camp having killed a massive giraffe, you would basically be insulted for having brought in the meat. And the idea was, as the old men would say, “We do it to cool young men’s hearts, so they don’t get ahead of themselves.” It creates this kind of leveling mechanism. There were all sorts of tricks and games that they used to be able to effectively share resources, so nobody wasted time on the politics of getting ahead. 

DUBNER: So what changes as the hunter-gatherer lifestyle fades away and we move into the agricultural period and the peasant lifestyle?  

SUZMAN: So, I talked about this immediate-return economy. Everything was focused on satisfying their immediate needs. Farming, by other hand, is a delayed-return economy. Every job you do is focused on an uncertain future. So you build surpluses for the future, but also all the work you do — when you plant or when you plow your field, or till it, or weed it, everything is in the hope that maybe six months down the line, you’ll get a harvest that you could then process. If it’s wheat and eventually thresh and turn into flour, and eventually you might get a loaf of bread. So, if you plant in spring, you might get a loaf of bread by winter time, if you’re lucky. So, everything was really hard work, and the risks were extremely high of not doing that work. There was always more work to do. Once you’ve planted the wheat, you have to continuously maintain it. Now, you might be lucky and there might be no pests. There might be a year with fewer weeds. There might be a year with perfect rainfall. But on the whole, no. So, to be a successful farmer would require taking a huge number of steps to mitigate risks that may well not happen. Putting the fence around the field to protect it from birds, even if you might not have a year with birds. Doing the steps to make sure that you could have the capability to irrigate that field, even if it happened to be a year where the rainfall was good. There was always more work that could be done in order to create that basic level of security. The archeological history of agricultural peoples, peasant peoples, when we dig up their bones, we see work-worn bodies. You worked long and hard, you probably died young, and died miserable, and were also — probably your teeth were falling out, and you were relatively anemic. Life was tough. 

DUBNER: Let’s talk about the notion of scarcity a bit, but let’s bring it into at least the 19th and then 20th and 21st centuries. In chapter 12 of your book, which is called — it’s a good title, “Malady of Infinite Aspiration” — you write, “For as long as people have congregated in cities, their ambitions have been molded by a different kind of scarcity from that which shapes those of subsistence farmers, a form of scarcity articulated in the language of aspiration, jealousy, and desire rather than of absolute need. And for the most part,” you write, “this kind of relative scarcity is the spur to work long hours, to climb the social ladder, and to keep up with the Joneses.” When I read that, I was very struck by it. It’s one of those big observations that, for me at least, is obvious in retrospect. But I don’t think it’s the first thing that a lot of people think about when they think about the modern economy and why we work so hard. We think we work so hard to make money to get the things that we want, and so on. Can you talk about the pros and cons of this close relationship between work and status, especially in modern cities?

SUZMAN: I suppose the way to make sense of it is to get a sense of what came before it, or the difference between cities and countryside, first of all. Everybody in rural areas was involved in effectively creating, generating, and acquiring the energy we needed to live, grow, and reproduce. That was what they spent their working lives on. Within cities, by contrast, people spent their energy and time using that energy provided by people in the countryside. The move to cities was this massive act of liberation in a sense. People were suddenly no longer tied to the process of securing the energy they needed to feed themselves, to reproduce. And it resulted in this extraordinary proliferation of jobs. It also transformed the way people constituted value, and saw themselves in relation to other people. When we moved into the era where we developed professions, or castes, these became great identifiers in and of themselves, because people tended to form communities based around common practice and common experience. A chef in ancient Rome will have a great deal more in common with other chefs in ancient Rome than, for example, the people that they serve their meals to, even if, you know, they may live in the same great house, there was very little connection between them. Same thing, of course, happens now. If you take a coder from Laos and a coder from San Francisco and a coder from Zurich, they’re probably likely to have a great deal more in common with one another. They’ll be able to strike up an effective conversation and share a whole series of symbols around which they build their day-to-day identity that they wouldn’t be able to do similarly with a builder, or one of the farmers in the fields outside my house in France on their tractors. 

AUTOR: I think people enjoy work more than they enjoy their jobs in some sense.  

That, again, is the economist David Autor.

AUTOR: It’s not just like, “I’m so happy to be in the office at this hour.” It’s more like, My job is part of my identity, is part of my group of friends, it’s what I tell people about, it keeps me engaged. So I may not love every hour I’m working, but I like that more than the unstructured life that doesn’t have that sense of service. Now, of course, there’s huge variety in the quality of jobs and by the way, the best predictor of job satisfaction is pay. But that’s not the only thing. People care about dignity and they care about security.  

And how much do they care about productivity? After all, that is the yardstick that economists use. The anthropologist James Suzman, in his book Work, tells a story about Kellogg’s, the cereal company. During the Great Depression, the company cut their workers’ hours to create an additional shift, which let them hire more people. The workday went from eight hours to six.

SUZMAN: Within a couple of years, they came to the realization that their workers were producing in their six-hour shifts the same amount of value as they’d been doing in the eight-hour shifts. And they kept their 30-hour week on the books for a very long time. It was only in the 1950s when you had this era of great aspiration coming, the birth of the great consumerist America In the case of Kellogg’s, the workers voted to increase their working week to 40 hours because they wanted more money, and they wanted more money to be able to consume more things. 

“They wanted more money to consume more things.” Lest you think that Suzman is being judgmental when he says that, keep in mind that he has faced the same kind of choice. A while back, he stopped working as an anthropologist to take a job with De Beers, the huge diamond cartel. He worked in public affairs and corporate social responsibility. I was surprised to learn this about Suzman — especially since De Beers has been known for a variety of questionable behaviors, from exploiting their workers to marketing diamonds as a rare and expensive commodity when in fact they are a relatively common mineral. So how did this anthropologist wind up working at DeBeers?

SUZMAN: By 2007, I had a pregnant partner. From my, whatever, first 15 years of work, with my Ph.D. and my masters, and having worked at the front line in difficult places, all I had to my name was a 4×4, a battered rifle, and my camping kit in Botswana. And suddenly I had a baby. Had there been universal basic income, I may well have been able to stick with that process of actually doing some really worthwhile work.  

DUBNER: It’s such an interesting side gig for you, especially in light of what we were talking about earlier, about scarcity. You know, there was a passage in your book that really caught my attention. You write that the principal purpose of your undertaking with this book is to “loosen the clawlike grasp that scarcity economics has held over our lives, and thereby diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth.” But when I think about scarcity — especially false scarcity — I think of De Beers. 

SUZMAN: Absolutely. They’re absolute masters of it. Admittedly, by the time I joined them, that business model had gone.

DUBNER: It lasted a while, though, didn’t it? 

SUZMAN: It lasted a while. And they did an absolutely brilliant job of creating scarcity while simultaneously manufacturing desire. 

DUBNER: James, how much were you paid at De Beers? I assume it was quite a bit more than college professor or author, yes?  

SUZMAN: Yes, I was, I was paid, I suppose — well, actually, I also discovered that I was crap at business. I didn’t know how to negotiate. So, when it came to things like negotiating salaries and so on, I discovered after I’d left that I did very, very poorly, indeed. One of the reasons I left was, actually, I paid off my house after seven years. And I thought, “Well, I don’t really need a great deal more stuff.” For me, my issue with the question of scarcity is this idea that we all have infinite desires. I absolutely do not have infinite desires. I have really quite limited desires. By 2013, after seven years of De Beers, I’d satisfied that. I’d paid off my house, and I immediately went back to working with Bushmen again, and writing books for really measly advances, but because I didn’t have the burden of having to pay a massive mortgage, I could afford to do that. 

DUBNER: So, how selfish is it for someone to want a job that satisfies them? 

SUZMAN: I mean, this for me is the fundamental question. My sense is that much of the work that we do now is simply that we create jobs because our social contract of our modern economy is based on the fact that everybody has to contribute labor. I think it is no longer necessary for everybody to have to contribute that kind of labor. And so what we do is we become very imaginative about creating really crap, low-paid jobs for people to do in order that they can simply get that license to participate in our society. 

DUBNER: What you’re describing now, you’re talking about what David Graeber described as “bull**** jobs,” right? All these jobs that aren’t that important, aren’t that meaningful, people hate them, and so on. And, you know, there’s been some dispute about how many jobs really are like that. But let’s assume that there’s some significant fraction of that. When you describe that scenario, who is the villain in your telling of the story? Because it’s not like we have a command-and-control economy like some countries have had.  

SUZMAN: Look, I’m a good anthropologist. There is no villain. We build these structures, conceptual structures, like an economy, like our agreements amongst all of us that we are prepared to accept pieces of paper or now dabs of plastic as sort of medium of accepted exchange. We build these institutions that exist above and beyond us, and they, in a sense, develop a life of their own. So, they become very, very difficult to change.  

As evidence of just how hard that kind of change can be — consider the famous prediction made in 1930 by the economist John Maynard Keynes. He said that productivity increases and technological advances would lead to a 21st century that would be an “age of leisure and of abundance,” and that we would work just 15 hours a week. That hasn’t happened. But we have been moving in that direction. Here’s David Autor again:

AUTOR: We work a lot less than we used to, in many dimensions. At the turn of the 20th century, Americans worked about 3,000 hours per year on average. At present, it’s under 2,000. Additionally, we have — well, weekends, which are a relatively modern invention. Overtime pay for some. We enter the labor force, you know, in early adulthood instead of in childhood —  we don’t start on the farm at age 10, we’re not put out for indenture at 14. And we retire when we have decades of healthy years of life remaining. So, in fact, our leisure as a share of lifetime, if you’re willing to count education as leisure — which some will, some won’t —  has risen extraordinarily. So I actually think we’ve handled the, quote, so-called “problem of leisure” pretty well. The problem of work that we have is that many highly paid people in our economy are overworked —  they work more hours than they wish they had to. And many lower-paid people can’t get enough hours and they have unstable jobs, they have involuntary part-time work, they can’t get a regular schedule. And so, you know, we have plenty of work, but it’s not very evenly distributed.

Coming up: how much can A.I. and other technologies even out that distribution? And: we go to a party where friends tell each other what they actually do all day.

Adina LICHTMAN: I don’t even know what she does. So this is why we do the event. 

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Fifty years ago, the Chicago writer and radio host Studs Terkel published a book called Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. Terkel interviewed dozens of people about their jobs: a cab driver, a waitress, a bookbinder, a factory owner, an industrial designer, a gravedigger, a carpenter. The book became a classic. It was even turned into a musical, and it inspired a Netflix show hosted by Barack Obama. It seems there is something deeply compelling about hearing people explain what they actually do in their jobs. So we went looking for a modern version of this. And we found it.

LICHTMAN: Hi, everybody.  

In an apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where Adina Lichtman and Avi Popack host a monthly party called “Our Friends Are Smart.”

LICHTMAN: So as many of you know, me and Avi love to host, whether it’s Shabbat dinners, wine and cheese nights, just all these different things. We have so many friends who, whether they’re a physical therapist, TV show writer, a data scientist, we don’t know what their day to day looks like. And we’re like, let’s open it up and actually learn about what our friends, our very smart friends, do. And we are so happy to have you here. Paula is one of my best friends in the whole world, and she is either a data analyst or data scientist. I don’t even know what she does. So this is why we do the event. Paula, take it away.  

Paula BARMAIMON: Thank you, guys. So, hi, everyone. For whoever doesn’t know me, I’m Paula. I actually live in London, and I work for the New York Times. I am a data analyst, a data scientist at the Times. 

To explain what a data scientist at the New York Times actually does, Paula Barmaimon gives a presentation about a project that she and her team worked on for several years.

BARMAIMON: The first thing that happens as an analyst, you get a question from your manager, leadership, or whoever. It’s usually very vague. “We want to understand how folks are reading our coverage. How long are they staying on it? Are they reading until the end?” And the first thing that we do for this question is like, do we even have data for this? And it turns out we had very, very messy data. So we need to transform it, put some business rules to it. The whole process of cleaning and just deciding on this business logic, and what the metric is going to be, took quite a few months. And once we have the metric, what can we do with a metric? We can start to look at insights. Is it different if people come from different platforms? If you come across the same article on search versus if you come to the homepage and you click on it, do we see the same behavior? So now that we have a metric, we can actually dissect our data and see what trends we find, and where we see opportunities. 

Avi POPACK: Is there a lot of pushback? I’d imagine, like especially in a newsroom, people are probably like, “Get off my back here.” You know, writing is subjective and you’re like, no, it’s fact. I know that no one’s reading your article.

BARMAIMON: Yeah, that’s a great question. It is different in different companies, but at the Times, data is in service of the newsroom and not vice versa, which means nothing we recommend or say goes. It’s really just surfacing insights. If an article is an important investigative piece and it has to be 10,000, 20,000 words, whatever it is, so be it. But sometimes it doesn’t need to be. Sometimes it could be shorter, or sometimes it could have a different format. At the end of the day, newsroom leadership decides. 

The next presenter has a job where success is measured very differently; he is a hospital chaplain.

Ben VARON: My name is Ben. I’m a rabbi. I graduated rabbinical school two years ago, from the Jewish Theological Seminary. My job as a chaplain is to provide emotional and spiritual support to patients, their families, and to staff in the hospital. Ninety percent of the people that I work with are not Jewish. I love my job because it allows me to work with people of all faiths and backgrounds. I walk into a room, I say, “Hi, my name is Ben. I’m one of the chaplains here at the hospital.” If that is something that I think will get them to respond back, great. Then maybe I’ll add, “We provide emotional and spiritual support,” and then see how that lands, and see if they catch. There are many times where that is just enough. I can tell that they want me to be there. And then there’s the middle ground of just continuing, “What brought you into the hospital?” I just want to be wherever they want and need me to be. If that is the religious side — they want to talk about their faith, they want to talk about why this is happening to them, they’re questioning God, they want prayer — great, we’ll do that. If they want more the emotional support, then we’ll do that. I really try to go in without any direction of where they might want to take it. And I just love people. I love being with people and I don’t think there’s any other job that would allow me to be with people as much as I am right now.  

For people who love people, who love being with people, what will the future of work bring? The fear is that artificial intelligence and other technologies will subtract a lot of people from the workforce. How true is that? We went back to the economist David Autor.

AUTOR: Let me say broadly what my hope for A.I., what it can be used for well, is to expand the reach of expertise. Like, you know how to do skilled repair? Now using this tool, you’ll be able to repair an engine you haven’t worked on before. Or you know how the human body works, you know the basics of the plumbing and taking care of people, now you can perform a procedure safely that you couldn’t have done without this tool. Or you’re a contractor, now you can do some home remodeling and engineering. It’s not a substitute for knowing something. Those tools in the hands of the wrong people can be quite dangerous, right? You don’t want a novice doing medical procedures or flying a plane, but with the right foundation of expertise, it can extend the power of that knowledge. And that’s where it can be complementary. So I would like to see A.I. used to enable more people who aren’t from elite institutions, who don’t have a four-year college degree, to be able to move more into software development, into paralegal work, into healthcare delivery, into design. That would be great for the quality of work, and for opportunity, but also it would lower the cost of a lot of super-expensive services that overpay people like me, and don’t employ as many people who don’t have Ph.D.s. 

DUBNER: You sound pretty optimistic about A.I., and the potential to make certain kinds of work more efficient. You’ve talked about reinvigorating the middle class by giving low-education workers the tools to do better work. But most of your solutions, if not all of them, sound as if they rely on institutions —  governments, firms, and so on — making good choices, adopting the right policies. What’s your level of optimism that this will happen, that A.I. can be the kind of boon that you’re describing?

AUTOR: I think it can be, but I’m not as optimistic that it will be. There’s different ways to go about the same task with A.I. Kaiser nurses in California complain that the A.I. is basically something that sits on your shoulder, overrides your judgment, and reports you if you deviate from protocol. And of course, in medicine, you want people deviating from protocol because they have additional information right in front of them about what they should do, and it may not always be the standard thing. But you could use that same tool to facilitate better decision-making. And so we need to push that frontier. 

DUBNER: So a lot of the prescriptions that you’re talking about sound to me as if they require an awful lot of coordination. You say, you know, we need this to happen and people need to do that, or we need to find a better way to do this. My concern hearing you is that I don’t know who’s doing the coordinating, and I’m not sure what incentives there are for the coordination to happen so well.

AUTOR: Yeah, I think this is very significant, and I agree with your point. I am appealing to coordination. It’s not clear who the coordinator is. This is actually a role that labor unions want to play. They want to play a role in the training and even design of the tools. I think this is a role that universities can play in terms of where they invest: are we trying to make machines that just replace people versus machines that make people more effective? I think the government plays a role both through tax policy — how much they incentivize investment in skills versus investments in machines — but also in trying to choose sectors. I mean, I know that’s unpopular. But say, look, we really want to maintain an auto sector, even though that’s not going to be cheap, even though we’re actually going to have to forego some cheap cars from China, we certainly will if we want to do that. Because that creates a type of work that we want people to have. 

DUBNER: So I know that you’re an economist, David, but do you ever feel that the mainstream economic embrace of a growth-centered economy has too many downsides and too many losers, and that it’s time to consider how to make the economy a little bit more human-centered?

AUTOR: Let me rephrase that in economic terms.

DUBNER: I thought I was using economic terms.  

AUTOR: Even more technical terms. So in economics, there is what are called the first and second welfare theorems. The first welfare theorem says that any efficient allocation of resources can be a competitive equilibrium. The other says that the problem of distribution and production are separable. So you can first maximize the pie and then divide the slices. And the problem with the second welfare theorem is it’s not true. It’s fundamentally not true at any relevant human level. You cannot do that. You cannot just have one person make all the money, and then we’ll just tax and transfer and we’ll all be happy. That just doesn’t work at a political level. In some sense there is an inseparability between what you produce and what you get. So I think where economists have really led us astray at times, they say, well, you know, “Let’s just focus on taxing the rich. We’ll just make the rich richer, and then we’ll just tax them, and everybody else, if your job gets crappier, we’ll send you a check. No worries.” And that is undignified. It’s politically not viable. And people want to feel that they’re living by the sweat of their own brow, their own hard work, and that it’s valued. Not that they’re being compensated for being the loser in this game. Once economists realize that you can’t just redistribute to solve the problems you create in the process of growth, it changes what tradeoffs you’re willing to make for growth. So the China trade shock — you know, we did get a lot of growth out of that. 

DUBNER: And China got an awful lot of growth out of it. 

AUTOR: China got a lot of growth out of it and fine, you know, can be a win-win. Nothing wrong with that. That’s the idea of trade. But a lot of people lost jobs and livelihoods, and they were displaced. We don’t have fewer jobs than we did as a result of the China shock. But we have a lot of people who lost careers permanently and lost manufacturing work and moreover, manufacturing-intensive communities basically went out of business. I don’t think that was a wise way to do that. I don’t think we needed that kind of shock therapy. If you had done that same transition over 20 years, it would have worked much better. Because people retire eventually, and people don’t go into sectors that are contracting. So we can make those types of adjustments over time. We just can’t make them between 2001 and 2007. I mentioned at the top of the show that I’m a labor economist and so I deeply believe that the labor market is the most important social institution. And I think the solution to a lot of socioeconomic problems starts with jobs. And I don’t mean the quantity again, but good jobs, jobs that actually provide dignity, economic security, and opportunity. The period we’re in right now where we have tight labor markets, rising wages at the bottom, and people being satisfied with their work and incomes growing — that’s a lot more effective than an equivalent transfer program that would somehow compensate people for not having that type of work. 

DUBNER: Like a guaranteed income?

AUTOR: Exactly. But that means we have a stake not just in the number of jobs, but in the types of jobs that we have. And so it does make sense to distinguish between jobs in food service, jobs in manufacturing, jobs in healthcare. A commerce secretary under Ronald Reagan famously said, you know, “Computer chips, potato chips, I don’t care which we make. You know, we’re in the chips business.” We should care. We actually should care. I don’t think it’s possible to have a well-functioning democracy that doesn’t have a solid middle class making its living from work. 

As far as we can tell, that quote about the chips was actually said by Michael Boskin, who was not commerce secretary under Reagan, but was chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors under George H.W. Bush. If you’d l like to learn more about the current CHIPS Act — that stands for “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors” — we did an episode about that with Gina Raimondo, who is commerce secretary, in the Biden Administration. It’s episode 533, and it’s called “Will the Democrats ‘Make America Great Again?’” Coming up: how can all work be made more satisfying?

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When we first started thinking about this episode, we immediately came up with a working title: “What Do People Do All Day?” This title was stolen from a children’s book by the beloved author and illustrator Richard Scarry. Here is his son Huck Scarry.

SCARRY: When I was growing up, my father worked at home. There were some dads who took the train into New York, and then there were other dads who stayed at home and made their children’s books. So it seemed to me like a very, very normal occupation to do.

Huck Scarry grew up in Connecticut, but when he was a teenager, the family moved to Switzerland. He still lives there, in the family’s chalet in Gstaad. He also spends time in Vienna — that’s where he was when we spoke. Richard Scarry died in 1994; Huck used to collaborate with his father, and is now the keeper of his legacy.

SCARRY: These books are now celebrating 50 years, 60 years, haven’t gone out of print, are known by grandparents who read them to their children when they were little. And their children read them to their children now, and it will go on and on.  

Richard Scarry wrote more than 300 books, which have sold more than 150 million copies, and were adapted into an animated TV series. Most of these books are set in a vibrant and colorful place called Busytown, where animals do the work of humans. There’s Postman Pig, Doctor Lion, Rudolf Von Flugel, an Austrian fox who flies an airplane. The book What Do People Do All Day? was published in 1968. It’s a bit like Studs Terkel’s Working, but for preschoolers. And it’s threaded through with the everyday economics of its time.

SCARRY: The way people work today was unimaginable when my father did this book. 

DUBNER: I understand you have a copy of What Do People Do All Day? and you’re willing to read a bit? Is that true?  

SCARRY: I’m certainly very willing to read. It’s going to lose an awful lot because you can’t see what I’m reading about. We don’t have the pictures. But I am willing to give it a go. 

Okay, let’s give Huck a hand. Close your eyes, try to draw the pictures in your mind.

SCARRY: Everyone is a worker. Here we have Farmer Alfalfa, Blacksmith Fox, Stitches the tailor, Grocer Cat, Mommy Cat and Huckle Cat. How many workers are there here? One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. And what do these workers do? Farmer Alfalfa grows all kinds of food. He keeps some of it for his family. And then he sells the rest to Grocer Cat in exchange for money. Grocer Cat will sell the food to other people in Busytown. Today Alfalfa bought a new suit with some of the money he got from Grocer Cat. Stitches the tailor makes the clothes. Alfalfa bought his new suit from Stitches. Then Alfalfa went to Blacksmith Fox’s shop. He had saved up enough money to buy a new tractor. The new tractor will make his farm work easier, and with it, he’ll be able to grow more food than he could grow before.

DUBNER: I’m curious what you think — or maybe what your father would have thought — of the idea that much of the work that’s described in the passages you just read — not all of it, but much of it — is now almost nonexistent, or at least not very common on the level that you described and that so much of the labor ecosystem has been rolled up into fairly mechanized and anonymous corporations, conglomerates, often controlled by private equity investors who may live thousands of miles away from where the work is done. And I’m curious what effect you think it might have on a child in 2024 reading about the work that your father described in that way, when the world is on some dimensions so different? 

SCARRY: I don’t think children worry about anything at all. I think they accept the illustrations and stories at face value and understand this little world of Busytown where people are blacksmiths and tailors and farmers and masons and whatever. Those jobs do still exist today. I mean, before coming here, I was at a bakery shop, and there has to be a baker. Of course, the bakery is a chain. And so the bread is baked in a larger bread-making factory in Vienna or near Vienna. But it’s still something that’s made by somebody. I don’t think that children think too much about investors or conglomerates or huge corporations. Those things do exist, of course, but there are nonetheless a lot of people also doing these — I don’t know what you would call them, not nuts and bolts jobs, but things that you make with your hands or, or do. You see people working in the street repairing the roads. There’s still a lot of work that’s done by people. And you can see them out there working.  

Huck Scarry is right, of course — there are still plenty of people out there working with their hands. But there are many fewer than there used to be. I wonder if that’s why so many of us love to do what I call “menial leisure.” Things like gardening, knitting, pickling — some of today’s most popular hobbies are things our parents and grandparents had to do to get by. But I don’t think it’s about nostalgia; I think it’s about the satisfaction of a physical thing done well. James Suzman, our anthropologist friend, has another example:

SUZMAN: Where I work, we have, in particular, Americans and Europeans coming, forking out $50, $60,000 to blow away an elephant. The money goes to the community, and the community rightfully asks, “Why on Earth do they spend unimaginably large sums of money, to come and do — what is in effect — hard work?” And Ju/’hoansi do have an answer for this themselves. They say after a hunt, “My legs are heavy, my stomach is full, and my heart is happy.” Very little contemporary work provides that sense of satisfaction. Modern efficiency has robbed most of us of that satisfaction that comes from baking a loaf of bread, digging a hole in the garden, and going on a hunt, going fishing. So many of us work long hours doing our day-to-day jobs, which do not provide that sense of satisfaction, that sense of completeness. In fact, they tend to leave this kind of void, that there’s something I still have to do. This concept of the Sunday scaries. It’s like chasing a carrot on a stick in front of us. We never get that sense of satisfaction.  

DUBNER: You’re describing Inbox Zero, which, you know, nobody ever gets to.  

SUZMAN: Exactly. And if we got Inbox Zero, most of us wouldn’t know what to do. Yet, there are activities that do provide that satisfaction, that also do provide the fundamental ability to lose oneself completely in your work. And that is what you get when you are fishing on a trout stream. You are lost in that space. You feel the sense of timelessness, a sense of being. And that is what we are robbed of in the modern working economy — or most of us, I should say, are robbed of. Interestingly, in the last — certainly, it’s been the case in the U.K. — there’s been this real shift back towards artisanal production as a means of doing things. So, Britain, which has famously appalling food, or historically famously appalling food, now has actually a whole new generation of artisan butchers and bakers who actually love their work, produce great food, and get this real sense of satisfaction and completion from what they’ve done, rather than simply going and getting their law degree or so on and so forth. 

AUTOR: If you spent all your day outside, you know, picking on a farm or doing backbreaking work, damn right you’d want to come in and watch TV. But if your work is a lot like watching TV, maybe you want to go out and garden. 

That, again, is David Autor, the economist. And he has some good news about job satisfaction today.

AUTOR: Recent data suggests that job satisfaction in the United States is higher than it’s been in a very, very long time. But it suggests, by the way, that a lot of that is because we have a tight labor market where wages are rising, and employers are working hard to win workers’ favor. So that’s a good thing. We see not only pay rising, but people are getting more predictable shifts. They’re getting more benefits. They’re getting education benefits. But we can do better than that. It doesn’t just have to be labor market pressures. My colleague at M.I.T. Sloan, Zeynep Ton, who runs the Good Jobs Institute, her work is on helping firms do better by low-wage workers. But by “do better,” she doesn’t mean just pay them more, which is easy. She means make them more productive so you can pay them more. She, for example, worked with Sam’s Club, which is kind of the Walmart Costco, to help them redesign the way they work. They reduced the number of job roles they had from approximately 60 to approximately a dozen through cross-training, and not only does that mean that workers have more flexibility, more portability, more headroom for moving up and doing more things. It changes the way you use workers. And so we see in the U.S. economy and elsewhere, different firms in the same business treating workers very differently because some use them less well than others. Some view them as disposable, as basically, “What do you expect to get for minimum wage?” And others think, well, we can actually take these people and turn this into a career. You see that at Costco. But even Walmart managers now, often who are not college graduates, can make a quarter million dollars and on up. I mean, it’s a super-hard job, but Walmart is giving them the opportunity. They don’t just bring in suits to do that job. 

And what does the future of work look like at the American Mural Project, in Winsted, Connecticut? They’ve been thinking about that, a lot. Ellen Griesedieck’s team runs a variety of programs and camps for young people. During our tour, we ran into one of those young people, with her dad.

GRIESEDIECK: Hi, Emily. Nice to see you. Hi, Jeff. Nice to see you. So Emily is an actual camper. 

DUBNER: What does that mean exactly? 

EMILY: That means I went to a bunch of camps here. I did the STEAM camp here. We made a bunch of, like, robotic things, and we did lots of arts. It was a lot of fun. 

DUBNER: Jeff, can I ask what kind of work you do? 

Jeff PUTNAM: I do computer work. I do I.T. work. 

DUBNER: When you look at this mural — both of you —  what do you think of these kinds of jobs? Some of them have already gone away. Some of them are on the way out. None of them are like what you do, Jeff.  

PUTNAM: No, no. No I.T. jobs on the wall. But even the jobs we do, computers replace computer people. I mean, that’s just a part of reality, with A.I. and things. But, I mean, these are the jobs that created America, right? And there’ll be new jobs that can create the future of America. They’ll eventually be represented on this mural, I’m sure. The whole country works together to do better things. 

Thanks to Jeff and Emily for speaking with us, as well as Ellen Griesedieck, Huck Scarry, James Suzman, David Autor, and everyone at the “Our Friends Are Smart” party. If you’d like to hear more from David Autor, make sure you follow one of the other podcasts we make — People I (Mostly) Admire, which is hosted by Steve Levitt. In an upcoming episode, you’ll hear Levitt’s interview with David Autor, and it is an excellent conversation between two economists:

Steve LEVITT: One thing that’s interesting about you right now is that there’s a lot of attention being given to predictions that you’re making when the nature of academic research is almost always backwards-looking. Does that unsettle you at all? 

AUTOR: Yeah, yeah. It takes a leap of faith, and you know you could be wrong. 

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Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Alina Kulman. We had recording help from George Hicks. Our staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Aboagye, Eleanor Osborne, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Greg Rippin, Jasmin Klinger, Jeremy Johnston, Jon Schnaars, Lyric Bowditch, Morgan Levey, Neal Carruth, Rebecca Lee Douglas, Sarah Lilley, Theo Jacobs, and Zack Lapinski. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; our composer is Luis Guerra.