What sparks progress? The right political conditions? Social pressure? Economic upheaval? In response to two listeners’ questions, we say… both none of those and all of the above. As an example, we talk through just one bit of the New Deal in the 1930s, which was the law to limit child labor. That movement started decades earlier, and continued decades afterward. For those keeping score at home, this a sneaky third installment of Kathryn’s 68-part series on the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938.

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In the category of low-hanging policy fruit, why won’t any politician pluck the ripe, juicy goodness of federally mandated paid sick leave? About 30 million American workers not only don’t get a paid day off when they have the flu, there’s no law on the books to prevent them from being fired if they call in sick. The job-protection aspect alone is worth $2,000 a year to vulnerable working moms. Of course this also keeps communities healthier because who needs to exposed to baristas with bronchitis?

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A recent article in the Washington Post proposed that U.S. labor data has just started to show the bite artificial intelligence is taking out of U.S. jobs – in this case, for computer programmers. Is AI going to cause mass joblessness? Silicon Valley bros seem to think so. Journalists seem to think so. So what’s with Kathryn’s ho-hum reaction? The long view: The United States has seen lots of technological progress over time, but technology has been the most villainized since 1980—also the era of declining worker power. It’s our gutted worker protections that make periods of technological transition so painful.

Read More:

More than a quarter of computer-programming jobs just vanished. What happened? [The Washington Post]

Majority of U.S. adults think AI will eliminate jobs over next two decades, but experts’ views are more mixed [Pew Research Center]

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