We need an alternative vision of economics to replace failed neoliberalism and rising economic nationalism. In a world facing record inequality, climate peril, and rising illiberalism, how do we build a more inclusive, more sustainable, more prosperous economy for everyone? This is the podcast of Economics for Inclusive Prosperity, a network of economists working to inspire new thinking in their field and highlight the transformative changes that are already happening.
Economics for Inclusive Prosperity
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Podcast Overview
We need an alternative vision of economics to replace failed neoliberalism and rising economic nationalism. In a world facing record inequality, climate peril, and rising illiberalism, how do we build a more inclusive, more sustainable, more prosperous economy for everyone? This is the podcast of Economics for Inclusive Prosperity, a network of economists working to inspire new thinking in their field and highlight the transformative changes that are already happening.
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1/14/2026
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Recent Episodes
June 5, 2026
How I learned to stop worrying and love the minimum wage
<p>When we talk about inclusive prosperity, what's top of mind is usually the 40-plus years of stagnation for the bottom 90% of American wage earners that began in the mid-1970s. It’s been the primary driver today’s record levels of inequality. University of Massachusetts economist <strong>Arin Dube</strong> has spent a significant portion of his career studying what caused that pay gap, which began with a decoupling of wage growth from productivity growth, and ways to address it. In fact, he’s been called the “go to guy on minimum wages” by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman. Now Dube has a new book titled “The Wage Standard: What's Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It,” where he argues that U.S. wage stagnation has not been about irresistible economic or societal forces, but instead mostly about policy choices. Among those choices has been a reluctance among politicians to raise the minimum wage—including the federal minimum wage, which he says at $7.25 per hour is so low that it’s functionally like having no minimum at all. His research has gone a long way to dispelling stubborn myths about minimum wages that have persisted despite growing empirical evidence to the contrary, but also to explain other forces driving employment monopsony—the market condition where a small number of employers effectively control the market for jobs and pay. To address those forces, Dube is advocating a number of measures ranging from trading slightly higher inflation for tighter labor markets to sectoral bargaining and stronger unions.</p> <p><strong>Resources mentioned in this episode:</strong></p> <p><a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/708374/the-wage-standard-by-arindrajit-dube/" rel="noopener noreferrer"><i>The Wage Standard: What's Wrong with the Labor Market and How to Fix It </i></a>(book) </p> <p><a href="https://jhr.uwpress.org/content/57/S/S50" rel="noopener noreferrer"><i>Monopsony in Movers: The Elasticity of Labor Supply to Firm Wage Policies</i></a> (paper) </p> <p><strong>About our Guest:</strong></p> <p><strong>Arin Dube </strong>is the Provost Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on labor economics, along with health economics, public finance, and political economy. His current areas of research include wage inequality, the importance of labor market competition, minimum wage effects on employment and inequality, the role of fairness concerns at the workplace, the interplay of behavioral biases and labor market power, the impact of unemployment benefits, and the role of firm wage policies in explaining the growth in inequality. He has also conducted research on employer health mandates; unions and collective bargaining; outsourcing and sub-contracting; gun laws and violence; and capitalization of private information in stock prices. Dube received his B.A. in Economics and M.A. in Development Policy from Stanford University, and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He has previously held positions of Visiting Professor at the MIT Department of Economics and Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. He is a NBER research associate, a research fellow at IZA, and a research affiliate of the MIT Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work.</p> <p><p><strong>Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP)</strong> is a network of academic economists from Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and other leading universities who are committed to an inclusive economy and society. EfIP members are working to transform their field around a new vision of prosperity—a vision that includes traditional economic metrics, but also expanded measures of wellbeing including access to health, to democratic participation, and to a livable planet. They’re also highlighting the important changes in economics that are already underway.</p><p> </p><p>Host <strong>Ralph Ranalli</strong> is a longtime Harvard podcaster, an entrepreneur, and former journalist. He previously hosted “HKS PolicyCast,” the award-winning flagship podcast of the Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a BA in political science from UCLA and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University.</p><p> </p><p>The Economics for Inclusive Prosperity Podcast is recorded at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The co-directors of Economics for Inclusive Prosperity are <strong>Dani Rodrik, Stefanie Stantcheva, Suresh Naidu, Atif Mian, </strong>and<strong> Ilyana Kuziemko</strong>. The show is co-produced by Ralph Ranalli and <strong>Tony Ditta, </strong>with social media management by <strong>Violet Van Buckman.</strong></p></p>
May 20, 2026
Why agricultural R&D is helping less where it's needed most
Today we’re talking about food, specifically agricultural R&D. The world’s population has grown from about 2 billion to 8 billion people in the last century. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. But the silver lining was that technology was advancing—particularly during the so-called “Green Revolution” from the 1940s to the 1980s when new high-yield grain varieties, fertilizers, and pesticides dramatically increased harvests in developing nations like Mexico and India. But during that time, economists were also developing an economic theory called the “inappropriate technology hypothesis.” It says that technological innovations developed for wealthy countries are specifically designed for conditions and environments in those countries, meaning they were often unproductive or inapplicable in developing countries. Fast-forward to today, when the effects of climate change—rising heat, drought, and extreme weather events—are already affecting farmers around the world, meaning we’ll need even more technological breakthroughs to mitigate them. But will those technologies help where they are needed most? In their research, economists Jacob Moscona of MIT and Karthik Sastry of Princeton have taken a new look at the intersection of the Inappropriate Technology Hypothesis—they like to call it “technological mismatch”—and agricultural research and development. They say there is a systematic rich-world bias in ag R&D that explains a large share of global disparities in both the adoption of new technology and agricultural productivity. They’re here today to discuss where that bias comes from, it’s effects, and some potential responses.
May 7, 2026
How meritocracy can help solve—or exacerbate—our inequality problem
<p>It’s a widely held belief in our society, even among groups that disagree with each other on other issues, that meritocracy is a public good. Broadly, meritocracy speaks to our innate sense of fairness—people should get what they deserve. But what exactly constitutes merit? In the dictionary, it’s defined as a “praiseworthy quality” or being deserving of praise. That’s about as subjective as it gets, since it depends entirely on the values of the person doing the praising. In academia, the definitions get more refined, but there is still disagreement. Is merit about “intrinsic excellence,” as defined by philosopher Thomas Mulligan? Or is it context-specific, as argued by Harvard economist Amartya Sen, who says it depends more on an individual’s ability to help achieve a society’s chosen values and goals? Our guest, economist and University of Chicago Professor <strong>Steven Durlauf</strong>, is the founding director of the school’s Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility, and has been researching meritocracy and its influence on inequality for decades, particularly in the area of university admissions. Durlauf says that done poorly, so-called meritocratic systems can be gamed by social groups in ways that help them to hoard their advantage and privileges. But done well, meritocracy can create greater equality of opportunity and help individuals from a broad swath of society to fulfill their potential. </p> <p>Listen to more of Steven Durlauf on <a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-inequality-podcast/id1693218758" rel="noopener noreferrer">The Inequality Podcast</a></p> <p><strong>About our Guest:</strong></p> <p><strong>Steven Neil Durlauf</strong> is the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor and the Director of the Stone Center for Research on Wealth Inequality and Mobility at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. Prior to this appointment, he was William F. Vilas Research Professor and Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Durlauf's research spans many topics in economics. His most important substantive contributions involve the areas of poverty, inequality and economic growth. Much of his research has attempted to integrate sociological ideas into economic analysis. His major methodological contributions include both economic theory and econometrics. He helped pioneer the application of statistical mechanics techniques to the modelling of socioeconomic behavior and has also developed identification analyses for the empirical analogs of these models. Other research has focused on techniques for policy evaluation and the econometrics of cross-country income differences. Durlauf is also known as a critic of the use of the concept of social capital by social scientists and has also challenged the ways that agent-based modelling and complexity theory have been employed by social and natural scientists to study socioeconomic phenomena.</p> <p>Durlauf received a BA in economics from Harvard in 1980, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. in economics from Yale in 1986. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory, a Fellow of the International Association of Applied Econometrics, and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011. From 2010 to 2022 he was co-director of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Working Group, an international research network linking scholars across disciplines in the study of inequality and the sources of human flourishing and destitution. </p> <p><p><strong>Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (EfIP)</strong> is a network of academic economists from Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and other leading universities who are committed to an inclusive economy and society. EfIP members are working to transform their field around a new vision of prosperity—a vision that includes traditional economic metrics, but also expanded measures of wellbeing including access to health, to democratic participation, and to a livable planet. They’re also highlighting the important changes in economics that are already underway.</p><p> </p><p>Host <strong>Ralph Ranalli</strong> is a longtime Harvard podcaster, an entrepreneur, and former journalist. He previously hosted “HKS PolicyCast,” the award-winning flagship podcast of the Harvard Kennedy School. He holds a BA in political science from UCLA and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University.</p><p> </p><p>The Economics for Inclusive Prosperity Podcast is recorded at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. The co-directors of Economics for Inclusive Prosperity are <strong>Dani Rodrik, Stefanie Stantcheva, Suresh Naidu, Atif Mian, </strong>and<strong> Ilyana Kuziemko</strong>. The show is co-produced by Ralph Ranalli and <strong>Tony Ditta, </strong>with social media management by <strong>Violet Van Buckman.</strong></p></p>
11 total episodes available
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