When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affected or created, the average wage paid, the impact on a defined geographic area. This is an approach labor economist David Autor knows well. But he also knows that the aggregate often masks the effect on the individual.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor, Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examines two momentous changes to global economics and how they play out for individuals. He explains to interviewer David Edmonds how the rise of China’s manufacturing dominance and the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence likely are and will affect individual people accustomed to do specific tasks for pay.

What he finds is not as straightforward as the headlines alluded to above. Take China and its remarkable ascent and how that impacted the United States.

“[The rise] benefited a lot of people. It lowered prices. It allowed American companies to kind of produce a lot of products more cheaply. You know, it's hard to imagine Apple's growth without China, for example, to do all that assembly, which would have been extremely expensive to do in the United States. At the same time, it displaced a lot of people, more than a million, and in a very geographically and temporarily concentrated way, extremely scarring the labor market. Now those people also got lower prices, but that's not even remote compensation for what they lost. And now there are new jobs -- even in those places where those trade shock occurs -- but it's not really the same people doing them. It's not the people who lost manufacturing work.”

Concerns about these shocks have been widespread in the 2020s, but the tough if erratic talk about tariffs coming from the U.S. president centers on the idea of restoring something (while ignoring question of that thing ever existed or if it makes sense to go back). Autor argues that the administration actually is asking the right question – but they are arriving at the wrong answers, He notes that the U.S. currently has a half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs open already, a sizeable figure relative to the nation’s 13 million manufacturing workers. But that number itself is roughly a tenth of China’s 120 million.

“We cannot compete with them across every front. .. What we should be very deeply worried about is losing the frontier sectors that we currently maintain. Those are threatened. So aircraft, telecommunications, robotics, power generation, fusion, quantum computing, batteries and storage, electric vehicles, shipping. These are sectors that we still have (except for shipping, actually) but China is making incredibly fast progress, and instead of trying to get commodity furniture back, we need to think about the current war we're in, not the last war.”

At MIT, Autor is co-director of the School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative, while off campus he is a research associate and co-director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Are university students unhappy? We won’t generalize, but many are, and this was something Bruce Hood noted. Being an experimental psychologist who teaches at the University of Bristol, an opportunity presented itself. Why not start a course on the science of happiness, and while teaching it collect data from the students attending?

The resulting course (created with advice from one his former students, Laurie Santos) proved popular, and Hood last year published a book, The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well. In this Social Science Bites podcast, Hood explains to interviewer David Edmonds the scientific basis of happiness, some details on how to measure it, and then some of those lessons for harvesting its benefits.

Hood explains how scholarship has determined some genetic basis for happiness, how circumstances contribute to but don’t dictate happiness, and how individuals focus more on the negative than the positive, which clearly not the most nurturing environment for happiness. There is a bias towards negativity, he says, “So that's why we know the negative things more quickly and more loudly than the positive.”

That sounds bad (see – negative). But there’s another bias at play, one that also favors optimism, that Hood attempts to harness. “So we tend to see the future as grim, and we have these distortions. But what's interesting, if you ask people, ‘Do you think to yourself individually you'll be better off in five years’ time?’ Then it seems to switch. People seem to say, ‘Yeah, I think I will be better.’ So, it's a kind of interesting paradox that we think the world's going to hell in a basket. And yet, as individuals, we think things can get better.”

Hood’s research interests arose around the visual development of infants, and then evolved to include intuitive theories, self-identity, essentialism and the cognitive processes behind magical thinking in adults. It was in relation to those that Hood first appeared on Social Science Bites, addressing the human belief in the supernatural. You can listen to that podcast, and also enjoy a lovely Alex Cagan poster built around the episode.

Let’s cut to the chase: “The overwhelming majority of murders in the United States involve guns,” says economist Jens Ludwig. “And in fact, most of the difference in overall murder rates between the United States and other countries are due to murders with guns.”

This may seem intuitively obvious to outside observers, but studying guns within the United States has long been a fraught endeavor, and the amount of research isn’t commensurate with the impact on U.S. society. That said, Ludwig has taken on exploring the roots of American gun violence, work that serves as grist for the Crime Lab he directs at the University of Chicago and for many of his books, including his latest, Unforgiving Places: The Unexpected Origins of American Gun Violence. What’s he’s found is that the folk wisdom around gun violence doesn’t rally hold up to the evidence.

In this Social Science Bites episode, he explains to interviewer David Edmonds how – using insights about ‘system one’ and system two’ thinking developed by Daniel Kahneman – cognition in individuals has more explanatory power than traditional variables like poverty, education and environment.

“I think system one plays an underappreciated role in all interpersonal violence, all of the issues, and this way of seeing what is driving violent behavior among people is equally true for knife violence in the UK and on and on,” Ludwig says. “So I think this is really a universal thing about people's behavior. This sort of frame on the problem helps make sense of a bunch of patterns in the data.”

Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, Pritzker Director of the Crime Lab and codirector of the Education Lab at that campus, and codirector of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s working group on the economics of crime.

He and his labs are routinely recognized for their work. The Crime Lab in 2014, for example, received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions, while eight years earlier Ludwig himself was awarded the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management’s David N. Kershaw Prize for Contributions to Public Policy by Age 40. Some of the books he’s co-authored or co-edited include 2000’s Gun Violence: The Real Costs, 2003’s Evaluating Gun Policy, and 2012’s Controlling Crime: Strategies and Tradeoffs.