Covid-19 is the biggest job killer in a century. As the lockdown eases, what does re-employment look like? Who will be first and who last? Which sectors will surge and which will disappear? Welcome to the Great Labor Reallocation of 2020.
Today’s show is the first of two episodes about employment and of course unemployment, considering what’s been happening with the Covid-19 pandemic. It is especially about re-employment — that is, what kind of jobs are coming back and when, and which jobs aren’t coming back. So we will hear from a labor economist with the Federal Reserve; another economist who used to work in the White House and the Department of Labor; another economist who thinks that even before the pandemic, we had automated away too many jobs; and another person who shares that view about jobs and automation: the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, whose call for a universal basic income has become a lot more urgent in the past few months.
But these two episodes are also about prisoners — specifically, prisoners and re-employment. And we’ll ask whether that research can tell us anything about Covid-19 re-employment generally. We are living through a historic disruption, a jolt to the labor markets that was unimaginable just a few months ago. There will be books and books written about it, and 50 years from now, it will show up in economics textbooks. Maybe they’ll call it then what we’re calling it now: the Great Labor Reallocation of 2020.
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