Let’s say you were asked to name the greatest health risks facing the planet. Priceton University economist Ramanan Laxminarayan, founder and director of the One Health Trust, would urgently suggest you include anti-microbial resistance near the top of that list.

“We're really in the middle of a crisis right now,” he tells interview David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “Every year, about 5 million people die of infections that are associated with antibiotic resistance -- 5 million. That's nearly twice the number of people who die of HIV, TB and malaria, put together -- put together. Antibiotic resistance and associated deaths are the third leading cause of death in the world, after heart disease and stroke. So you're talking about something that's really, really big, and this is not in the future. It is right now.”

The underlying problem, simply put, is that humans are squandering perhaps the greatest health innovations in the last century by using antibiotics stupidly, allowing pathogens to develop resistance and thus rendering existing antibiotics worthless.

For the last 30 years and in particular through One Health Trust and as director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Antimicrobial Resistance, Laxminarayan has labored to make both shine a light on anti-microbial resistance and push for policies to address it. This, he tells Edmonds, is a social science problem even more so than a medical science problem – but not the exclusive province of either. “I think one of the failures of economics,” he says, “in some ways, is that we don't take the trouble to understand the nitty gritty of the actual other field, especially when it deals with health economics or environmental economics.”

In addition to his role as a senior research scholar at Princeton, Laxminarayan is an affiliate professor at the University of Washington, a senior associate at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde.

Flexibility is a cardinal virtue in physical fitness, and according to political psychologist and neuroscientist Leor Zmigrod, it can be a cardinal virtue in our mental health, too. How she came to that conclusion and how common rigid thinking can be are themes explored in her new book, The Ideological Brain.

“I think that from all the research that I've done,” she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, “I feel that what rigid thinking does is it numbs people to the complexity of their own experience, and it simplifies their thinking. It makes them less free, less authentic, less expansive in their imagination.” And while she acknowledges there are times being unbending may be seen as an asset, “rigid thinking is rarely good for you at an individual level.”

In this podcast, she details some of the work – both with social science experimentation and with brain imaging – that determines if people are flexible in their thinking, what are the real-life benefits of being flexible, if they can change, and how an ideological brain, i.e. a less flexible brain, affects politics and other realms of decision-making.

“When you teach or when you try to impart flexible thinking, you're focusing on how people are thinking, not what they're thinking,” Zmigrod explains. “So it's not like you can have a curriculum of ‘like here is what you need to think in order to think flexibly,’ but it's about teaching how to think in that balanced way that is receptive to evidence, that is receptive to change, but also isn't so persuadable that any new authority can come and take hold of your thoughts.”

Zmigrod was a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University and won a winning a Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College there. She has since held visiting fellowships at Stanford and Harvard universities, and both the Berlin and Paris Institutes for Advanced Study. Amond many honors the young scholar received are the ESCAN 2020 Young Investigator Award by the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, the Glushko Dissertation Prize in Cognitive Science by the Cognitive Science Society, . the 2020 Women of the Future Science Award and the 2022 Women in Cognitive Science Emerging Leader Award, and the 2022 Distinguished Junior Scholar Award in Political Psychology by the American Political Science Association.

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.