Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers

The July jobs report just dropped, and it's time to worry. Markets expected around 80,000 new jobs — instead, the economy lost 23,000, and revisions to the prior two months erased another 100,000 we thought we had. In this video, Justin Wolfers break down what's really going on beneath the headline: the drop in government jobs might be statistical noise, essentially all private-sector job growth is coming from healthcare and social assistance, and the falling unemployment rate is actually bad news once you look at labor force participation.
Justin also digs into a wonkier puzzle — why the payroll and household surveys are telling two different stories about American employment — and compare the US to Canada, where job growth has been roughly four times faster despite a tariff war hitting them harder. Plus: what this all means for the Fed's next move, and why (despite what you may have heard) these numbers are not being faked.
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Justin unpacks the new $100,000-a-year Truth Social API—a special "pipe" that will allow the president's posts to hit Wall Street computers a second or so before the rest of us see them. In this episode of Diving In, he explains why one second is an eternity for a high-frequency trading computer: it can read a post announcing a strike on Iran, figure out what it means for markets, and sell before the news reaches your phone.
Justin lays out three problems. It's bad for democracy — a decision your taxes paid for gets sold to whoever writes a six-figure check, to a company in which President Trump is a major shareholder. It's corrupt on its face — the president is monetizing information he holds only because he works for you. And it's bad economics: once you know some traders have paid for an edge (remember teleprompter guy?), you stop wanting to trade at all, and markets that run on trust start to wither.
At the end of the day, those Wall Street firms will get rich, and that money has to come from somewhere. And if you're not the one with the early feed, it's probably coming from your retirement account.
(A confession: I think that I said that users pay the President's company $100,000 per year. I've subsequently read the price is $100,000 per month. So it's still a problem, but 12 times larger.)
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When the CEO of Anthropic warns AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, it's easy to picture the destruction. Justin Wolfers wants you to picture the other half of the story. In this episode of Diving In, he uses a carefully researched study of Victorian bootmaking — where a labor-saving sewing machine let each worker make four times as many boots — to show how a technology can completely remake an industry while total employment barely moves.
The numbers are almost eerie: about 220,000 bootmakers in 1851, and 213,000 in 1911. Yet beneath that calm surface, nearly everything changed. Cheaper boots meant more boots (that's Jevons paradox), old craft occupations vanished, and an almost identical number of new factory jobs appeared — in new places, done by the next generation. The incumbents mostly got to retire in their old trade.
None of this predicts what AI will do to your job. But it widens the range of outcomes you should take seriously, and it flags the one thing that may matter most: the pace of change. If AI moves slowly, the creative side of creative destruction has time to arrive. If it moves fast, that gentler adjustment gets much harder. Either way, it’s important to also ask what gets created, not just what gets destroyed.
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This is a conversation between Justin and Larry Kotlikoff, fellow economist and host of the Economics Matters podcast. And it was a fun one, in which Larry encouraged Justin to look both backwards and forwards. Backward at some of the work he's most proud of, and forward at the growing challenges we face as an economy and a nation.
In the process, Justin and Larry philosophized over the role of economics and the duty of economists in helping tackle some of the most pressing issues of our time. This was the kind of conversation that reminded Justin why he fell in love with economics: it’s not the models or the math, but the chance to make sense of the lives we actually live.
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Justin and Stacey are back for Off the Clock — helping you figure out what economic news to actually worry about, what you can safely ignore, and where to find some silver linings.
This week was a big one for economic news and data. Justin starts by explaining to Stacey why this latest round of tariffs is the dumbest one yet. And Stacey brings in some reporting to highlight how small businesses are struggling under the weight of constant chaos and confusion.
Then they dig into the Fed and why markets reacted so poorly to Handsome Kevin’s press conference. Finally, Justin and Stacey discuss the latest, lackluster GDP numbers and compete in a “Chart vs. Chart” contest that you get to be the judge of.
02:42 More tariff chaos and confusion
23:53 The Fed vs The Market
34:16 A disappointing GDP report
41:05 Chart vs Chart — A Friendly Competition
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