Employers Are Begging for Workers. Maybe That’s a Good Thing.
About this episode
Cornell political scientist Jamila Michener treats post-Covid employer panic as a moral panic, arguing the economy should be worker-centric rather than employer-centric. Drawing on her research, she explains how poverty is used as a policy tool — the principle of less eligibility, keeping work's alternative miserable to coerce labor — and calls poverty on a societal level exploitative, since cheap services depend on low-wage work. They discuss federalism's status-quo bias, how Medicaid's design shapes recipients' political participation, deservingness politics around benefits, and the tradeoffs between universal basic income and a negative income tax, ending on the idea that inflation panic, not unemployment, now drives policy.