Corporate profits are booming. So why haven’t most workers gotten a raise?
For decades, we’ve been told a simple story: work harder, become more productive, and your wages will follow. But what if that story was never really true?
This week, Nick and Goldy talk to Arindrajit Dube—one of the most influential economists shaping how we understand wages, and author of a new book, The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It —for a conversation that cuts to the heart of how pay actually works in America.
At a moment when the gap between what the economy produces and what workers take home keeps growing, this episode challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions in economics—and asks what it would take to build a labor market that actually delivers for working people.
Because if wages aren’t just set by “the market”… then they can be changed.
Arin Dube is an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and one of the leading researchers on wages and labor markets. He is the author of The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It, and has advised policymakers in the U.S. and internationally on minimum wage policy and labor market dynamics.
Social Media:
@arindube.bsky.social
@arindube
Further reading:
The Wage Standard: What’s Wrong in the Labor Market and How to Fix It
MBAs in management lead to lower employee pay, study finds
Eclipse of Rent-Sharing: The Effects of Managers’ Business Education on Wages and the Labor Share in the US and Denmark
Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimates
Using Contiguous Counties
NELP Research Brief on Minimum Wage Effects Across State Borders: Estimates Using Contiguous Counties
Minimum wage own-wage elasticity repository: a representative estimate of the own-wage elasticity (OWE) of employment from every minimum wage study published since 1992.
Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com
Facebook: Pitchfork Economics Podcast
Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Threads: pitchforkeconomics
TikTok: @pitchfork_econ
YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics
LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer
Substack: The Pitch
