Nearly 30 million workers, or roughly one in five workers throughout the country, are required to have a professional license before they can do their jobs.

That’s more than twice the number of workers who belong to unions. And it’s almost ten times the number who earn the minimum wage. But in comparison to those other economic arrangements, curiously little attention is given to the process that governs licensing, the perverse outcomes it so often leads to, and the vulnerable workers who are affected by it.

Cardiff’s guest on this episode is Vanderbilt law professor Rebecca Haw Allensworth, author of “The Licensing Racket: How we decide who is allowed to work, and Why it goes wrong.” Among Cardiff’s picks for the economics book of the year, it is the product of not just a scholarly understanding of the topic, but of years and years of painstaking reporting, interviewing hundreds of people, and unearthing a variety of frankly shocking anecdotes.

She and Cardiff discuss:

• The legal and institutional design behind the boards that oversee licensing in each state
• How the desire to protect the already licensed leads board to impose outrageous requirements for new licenses
• The ludicrous rationalizations of so many licensing boards for erecting obstacles to new workers entering their professions
• The shocking failure of licensing boards, especially within medicine, to actually fulfill the mission they are set up to pursue: protect public safety
• How the ratcheting up of licensing requirements led to a standoff between nurses and doctors
• How licensing hurts dynamism and entrepreneurship
• The more substantive tradeoffs involved in licensing, including the pride and validation that existing practitioners feel in having a license
• Which jobs shouldn’t require a license, and for those that do, a better way forward

All throughout, Rebecca shares with Cardiff the tales of the workers, board members, and the others she interviewed.

Related links:

• The Licensing Racket, by Rebecca Haw Allensworth
• Rebecca Haw Allensworth page at Vanderbilt Law School

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mike Bird, the Wall Street editor of The Economist, joins Cardiff to discuss his new book, The Land Trap: A New History of the World’s Oldest Asset.

By one estimate, the value of land makes up roughly a third of all the wealth in the entire world. Add the houses and commercial buildings on top of the land and the total value is almost two-thirds.

And according to Mike, land “defies some of the usual laws of capitalism that apply to other goods and assets.” Its supply is fixed, it is immobile, and it neither decays nor depreciates.

These special qualities have given land its fascinating history. They’re also the reason that so many economies end up in what Mike refers to as the land trap.

Mike and Cardiff discuss:

• The definition of a land trap
• Why booming land values are a problem while they’re rising and not just because they often set the stage for a bust
• How land affects older, established companies differently than newer, innovative businesses — and why that matters for the economy
• The perverse incentives that rising land values can have on a nation’s economy
• The land histories of America, China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore
• Land reform and the development of low-income countries
• The lessons of Singapore

And more!

Related links:

• The Land Trap, A New History of the World's Oldest Asset
• Housing booms, reallocation and productivity, by Sebastian Doerr, BIS

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How can the United States make its economy more resilient not just to future economic shocks but the threat of such shocks from its geopolitical rivals?

Arnab Datta has spent years working on this very question. In the immediate aftermath of the recent rare earths showdown between America and China, Datta and his colleagues at the Institute for Progress and Employ America published a new analysis titled How to Implement an Operation Warp Speed for Rare Earths.

China’s global dominance in rare earths, acquired over decades, allows it to “gain leverage in trade negotiations, retaliate against American restrictions, degrade American and allied technological capabilities, and potentially even to entrench its dominance in downstream rare earth-dependent manufacturing supply chains,” write Datta, Saif Khan, Tim Hwang, and Tim Fist.

The scope of the report extends well beyond the specific threat of a shock to America’s supply of rare earths. It speaks to the very nature of the ongoing geopolitical dispute with China itself — and more broadly, to the question of how best to respond when a single country has taken steps for decades to distort the global market of a product that the entire world depends on.

Why did the United States fail to spot the emerging threat? How should it respond now — and in such a way that embraces core American economic values like competition and innovation?

Related links:

• How to Implement an Operation Warp Speed for Rare Earths
• Arnab’s work at Employ America
• Arnab’s work at the Institute for Progress

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.