AI is here. Where are the new, better jobs?

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1:16All so that he can help students, staff, and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. We're going to do jobs today, and it's not going to be great. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

1:48I'm Kyle Rizdahl. It is Tuesday. Today, the 28th of October. Good, as always, to have you along, everybody. We begin today with news of the American labor market. Some not-so-happy news, I'm afraid. Amazon said today it's laying off 14 ,000 corporate workers, the first slice of what's expected to be 30 ,000 white-collar layoffs in all. The online education company Chegg said yesterday it's cutting 45 % of its remaining workforce. That's after cutting 20 % of it earlier this year. Companies, as you know, lay people off all the time for all manner of reasons. But here in 2025, when white-collar workers get let go, one reason in particular seems to be cropping up more and more.

2:32Chegg publicly blamed artificial intelligence chatbots for eating its business model, which is helping kids do their homework. Amazon CEO sent employees a note back in June telling them that AI is going to eliminate the need for some kind of jobs in that shop. You know, usually what happens when transformative technology comes along, the steam engine, the internet, to pick just two, what happens is that old jobs get replaced with new and better jobs. So where are the new AI jobs exactly? Marketplace's Matt Levin gets us going. Remember when everyone wanted to be a prompt engineer? That was the hottest AI job title back in 2023, shortly after ChatGPT launched.

3:16Even if you weren't a programmer, if you played with the technology enough to actually get it to do what you wanted it to do, a company might pay you six figures to be their professional robot whisperer. Well, it's 2025. Have any of your friends been offered a prompt engineering job yet? That's a great question. I'm still wondering when that phone call is coming for me as well. Larry Schmidt is an economist at MIT Sloan School of Management. Turns out the AI got smart enough where lots of businesses could easily teach their employees how to be the types good questions guy. No new salary or title required.

3:51We do find evidence that the jobs are changing, but it's more subtle than that. It's not necessarily that whole new categories of jobs get created. At least not within just three years. Harvard economist David Deming says in the long run, those subtle AI changes will likely evolve jobs into something better than they are now. if history is any guide. Think about like an office assistant went from stenographer to typist to secretary to administrative assistant to executive assistant. So that's just one example of a job that changes not just titles, but really functions underneath in response to changes in office technology.

4:27If you're wondering what happens until we get to the long run, history has some other lessons where the short run is, well, maybe we should all brush up on our dickens. If you look at like, for example, when the economy industrialized, you know, about 150 years ago, it was a pretty bad time for humanity for a couple of decades. For now, companies are trying to figure out what to do with employees who are saving time by using AI. David Martin helps companies implement new AI processes at Boston Consulting Group. What you would typically see is 20 % of that person's time then can go toward innovation.

5:01So the old Google model of spend your Fridays thinking about something more blue sky. Martin says one common topic of such brainstorming, how do we keep AI from putting us out of business? I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace. Ironically, or perhaps not, AI drove equities today. We will have the details when we do the numbers.

5:40If this is Tuesday, it must be another day without government data on this economy. Spare a thought here, by the way, for Jay Powell and the gang at the Fed trying to figure out which way to turn the interest rate dial in their big meeting today and tomorrow. Spoiler alert, they're going to turn it down. Overwhelming expectations are for a quarter percentage point cut in the federal funds rate, data drought or not. But we did get a clue this morning about a very important part of this economy. You, the Consumer Confidence Index from the good people at the conference board, fell slightly in October because we're just not all that economically confident.

6:18Marketplace's Sabri Beneshaw explains what's going on there. The mood, on average, among consumers is ambivalent to glum. Seems that confidence has been stuck. Stephanie Guichard is a senior economist at the conference board. And it's not moving out of this very narrow range where it has been since June. The reasons will probably not shock you. It's overwhelmingly inflation and prices. And second to that is tariffs. Of course, like with anything, it depends on who you ask. For younger people and those making less than$75 ,000 a year, confidence fell. For older people and those making more, confidence rose.

6:58For people making more than$200 ,000 a year, it rose a lot. Matt Luzzetti is chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank. It's consistent with an economy where higher-income households, particularly those that are homeowners and have been homeowners for a while, are perceiving the economy as doing better. They're more likely to own stock, too. And stocks are doing great, so they feel great about it. While at the same time, those households that are younger or at the lower end of the income distribution are experiencing more pressures. Now, what consumers think and what consumers do are two very different things.

7:34People can be depressed but still click add to cart. So consumer confidence isn't a great predictor of overall spending. But there is one thing consumer feelings do predict well, the unemployment rate. Part of the Consumer Confidence Survey asks about how hard it is to get a job. Bradley Saunders is with Capital Economics. What's interesting is if you take the number of people saying that jobs are plentiful and take away the share of people who are saying that jobs are hard to get, then that spread tends to be quite a good leading indicator of the unemployment rate. More people said jobs were plentiful in October than the month before, and fewer people said jobs were hard to get.

8:12That would suggest, says Saunders, the unemployment rate is not going to rise by much, if at all, which is a confidence boost. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshore for Marketplace. The ticker symbol O the day today is W, just W, Wayfair. The mostly online home goods retailer reported way better than expected quarterly earnings this morning. It's bucking a slowdown in furniture sales, Wayfair is, pointing to its loyalty program and an expansion into brick and mortar as reasons why. But, asterisk here, note that the quarter for which it was reporting today wrapped up at the end of September, which matters when you remember that that was just before President Trump's tariffs hit a pulse of furniture and cabinets and the like.

8:59And those import taxes the president has imposed, paid, I'm required to remind you by American consumers and businesses, are only one part of the headwinds that are buffeting home furnishing retailers. Marketplace's Megan McCarty Carino has that one. Home goods sales have been in a bit of a funk because of the pandemic, says analyst Egal Arunian at Citi. Consumers coming out of COVID bought pretty much everything they needed for their homes for a number of years. People were stuck inside furnishing home offices and zhuzhing up their Zoom backgrounds. They were also moving a lot with mortgage rates at historic lows.

9:36That feels like a long time ago. Existing home sales are still at record lows and rates have come down off the highs, but you still haven't seen this big tick up in housing market activity. The frozen housing market is probably the biggest factor dragging down furniture demand, says retail consultant Catherine Black at Kearney. But she says Wayfair has done better than the rest of the sector by selling smaller housewares, bed linens, throw pillows, hand towels. That's not dependent on a new home. That's dependent on a consumer wanting to refresh their space. They might be sick of the coastal grandmother vibe they went all in on during lockdown.

10:16But even the redecorating might stop once consumers feel the full effect of tariffs. I think everyone's bracing a little bit, holding their breath a little bit for what might be to come. Most furnishings are imported and subject to country-level tariffs. Then there are the specific tariffs on upholstered furniture, cabinets, and lumber. But, says analyst Zach Tamber at eMarketer, Wayfair is somewhat insulated from that because its vendors are bearing those costs. It operates as a marketplace and doesn't import goods itself. However, that will inevitably drive up the cost of goods that it's selling, which likely will cause consumers to think twice before they click the buy button.

11:03Prices on home furnishings have already increased 8 % since March, according to Harvard's Pricing Lab. I'm Megan McCarty Carino for Marketplace.

11:22Finding a home with everything you're looking for, that big backyard, a beautiful fireplace, or the perfect kitchen, whatever it is, that can be tough enough. But it goes to a whole other level when you add handicapped accessibility into the mix. More than 70 million people in the United States live with some sort of disability. That's about 20 percent of the population. But just 5 percent of U.S. homes have disability accommodations. That's according to data from Housing Wire. So some remodeling work might be in order. Here's today's installment of our series, Adventures in Housing. My name is Brian Bradley.

11:58I live in Farmington, Utah. Recently, we bought a home that we've been renovating for our daughter with special needs.

12:08Savannah's nine years old. She's completely immobile, relies on us for everything she needs and so the house we were in had stairs up to her room which when she was small wasn't too difficult right we could just carry her upstairs. It was in early 2020 that she had a girl spurt started to get big like kids do, right? And so we needed something different. We looked at a few houses that were wheelchair accessible homes that had already been modified to be such, but none of them really fit the needs outside of the wheelchair. Savannah's not our only child. We have three other kids and, you know, as much as we want to cater to Savannah, we also want to make everybody else in the house happy, right?

12:53The house that we ended up finding, my sister actually lives down the street. And I think having family nearby made a big difference in our decision to purchase that home.

13:06There really was nothing as far as like the wheelchair accessibility in the home when we moved in. We've put in a couple of wheelchair ramps to get over the stairs that go into the house. It's not perfect. We still have to pop a willy to get onto the ramp, but it works great. We've put in a lift in her bedroom that will lift her up out of her bed, and then we can move her into her wheelchair. And we recently did a bathroom renovation. It's been expensive. To get the landscaping of the house to a place where she could be outside and enjoy it, we've probably spent$20 ,000. Inside, the ceiling lift was$10 ,000, and the bathroom renovation came out to close to$40 ,000.

13:53But we were able to reach out to community resources like family and neighbors to help pay for some of those things.

14:04It's hard to say forever is forever, right? We don't know what's going to happen 10 years down the road, but we would like this to be a forever home, a place where we stay. I've definitely learned with having a special needs child that you can't predict what's going to happen next week. And having that long-term vision is important, but what's important is Savannah's comfort right now and making it function right now. And so it's hard to say that we'll be there forever, but we would like to be.

14:34Brian Bradley in Farmington, Utah. Whether you're buying a fixer-upper or settling into that forever home, let us know. would you marketplace.org slash adventures in housing is where you do that

15:02coming up i discovered that somebody had plagiarized my papers and uh that made me very angry. Yeah. Scandals in science. But first, sure, why not? Let's do the numbers. Dow Industrial's up 161 today, about a third of 1%, 47 ,706. The Nasdaq climbed 190 points, 8 tenths percent, 23 ,827. The S &P 500 gained 15 points, a quarter percent, 68 and 90 there. Wall Street, as usual, generally applauded companies for making those layoffs. Matt down 30 ,000 jobs, up 1%. United Parcel Service, I didn't mention this, 48 ,000 jobs down, up 8%. The exception, though, educational technology firm Chegg tumbled 13 and two-tenths percent because in addition to laying off nearly half its employees, its CEO stepped down and the company said AI is having an adverse impact on its business.

15:57As we mentioned, you are listening to Marketplace.

16:15This is the story of the one. As a custodial supervisor at a high school, he knows that during cold and flu season, germs spread fast. It's why he partners with Grainger to stay fully stocked on the products and supplies he needs, from tissues to disinfectants to floor scrubbers. All so that he can help students, staff, and teachers stay healthy and focused. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done. This is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Rizdahl. A little bit more than three years ago, in the summer of 2022, the federal government ended a pandemic-era program that had offered free school breakfasts and lunches to all students.

16:59That meant that in most states, things went back to the way they were in the before times. Most students pay full freight. Students who meet family income eligibility requirements get free or reduced price meals. That's the bureaucratic part of this story. The real world part of the story is that even three years on, some schools are still struggling with the end of free meals for all. Marketplace's Carla Javier reports from Cheshire, Connecticut. It's lunchtime at Cheshire High School. Students scoop up burger bowls and chicken chipotle panini, then head to the cash registers. Have a good day.

17:35Thank you. Their lunches cost between$4.50 and$5.50. But almost one in five of them don't pay that much because they're eligible for free or reduced-price meals. In both cases, federal funds reimburse the district for the difference. Erica Biagetti is the director of food and nutrition services at Cheshire Public Schools. She says to be eligible for free meals, a family of four needs a gross income under roughly$42 ,000. And to be eligible for reduced-price lunches that cost just 40 cents, a household of four would need to gross under$59 ,478. That is low. Biagetti says the students she worries about come from families with incomes just above that threshold.

18:24They used to get school meals for free, but now, if they have a couple kids, they have to come up with one or two thousand bucks every school year. And they're having to make those tough decisions of, what am I going to send for lunch? What bills do I pay? What am I going to do here? If families don't pay, then schools are on the hook for the difference. And across the country, the amount they're having to cover is rising. According to the School Nutrition Association, in 2018, the median school nutrition program reported an unpaid meal balance of$3 ,400. In fall of 2024, it was$6 ,900. And even in Connecticut, which is one of the highest per capita incomes in the country, Biagetti says her district had to cover more than$25 ,000 in unpaid meal debt last school year.

19:12Juliana Cohen is a school nutrition researcher who teaches at Merrimack College in Harvard. She says sometimes community members will chip in to cover the school's shortfall. But more often than not, this ends up being paid off by the school district. And that affects other programs. Sometimes they pay it off from the student activity fund, but sometimes it also comes from the general academic fund. Some states, including California and New York, have stepped into the gap left when the federal government ended universal free meals by dedicating state money to provide them. And in November, Colorado voters will consider raising a tax on high earners to continue funding that state's meal program.

19:54Meanwhile, in Connecticut, Erica Biagetti and her colleagues on the Cheshire School nutrition team are already facing$10 ,000 in unpaid meal debt this school year. And they're having to make some tough calls home to families with high balances. It doesn't feel good for anyone. The families, the staff, the people calling. She says she's hopeful more states, including Connecticut, will find a way to fund universal meals once more, like they do for other school services. Every student gets a ride on the bus. You are secured a seat no matter if you have a vehicle at home or you don't. You're given a Chromebook even if you have a computer at home.

20:32You're given the tools that you need to succeed in your school day. In the meantime, Erica Biagetti says she and her team will encourage eligible families to apply for benefits. If they're eligible for SNAP benefits, they're also eligible for free or reduced-price meals. And connect them with soup kitchens, food banks, and other forms of assistance. I'm Carla Javier from Marketplace.

21:09academic journals while perhaps not the most scintillating reading for a layperson are big big business to the tune of billions of dollars every year the challenge for the industry is that all that money makes fraud an attractive option. According to an analysis by the journal Nature, more than 10 ,000 research papers were retracted in 2023. That's a record for a single year. One of the leaders in the effort to root out that malfeasance is Dr. Elizabeth Bick. She's a microbiome expert by training turned science integrity investigator. Dr. Bick, welcome to the program. Pleasure to be here. How does a microbiologist become a science integrity person?

21:49Could you tell us how you got there? It was sort of a strange career switch, I guess. Yes. I discovered that somebody had plagiarized my papers and that made me very angry. And so I worked on plagiarism for a while. And then by accident, I discovered somebody had duplicated images that were representing different experiments. So then that became my new hobby. And now it's my profession. Well, give us the 30-second talk on how big a problem this is in the academic publishing industry, which is worth billions and billions of dollars. And as you've demonstrated, some of it's just fake. It is. A couple of years ago, I did a big study of 20 ,000 papers, and I found that 4 % of those papers contained duplicated or manipulated images.

22:35And we estimated about half of those, so 2 % of those 20 ,000, were done deliberately. So a photoshopped image, for example, or an image that have been rotated or mirrored. But I think since then, the problem has only grown because there's almost now a commercialized type of fraud. We call them paper mills, an industry that creates these fake papers and sell the authorships to authors who want to have a paper. They actually advertise on Facebook or other social media. Yeah, and I think it's a way that folks in maybe countries that do not have a lot of money to give to science. They're hoping for maybe a better quality of life, maybe a position in North America or in Europe.

23:23And they need those papers to pad their resume. Explain then the concept for us of peer review, because I had thought the whole thing was that people with expertise in the subject at hand review these things and then they get published. No? Yes, that is definitely the case. But I think peer review is not really designed to catch fraud. It's designed from the idea that the data that you're reviewing as a peer reviewer is real. And I think that worked really well until maybe one or two decades ago, because the field of science and specifically the field you're peer reviewing in, which is your own field, was relatively small.

24:07But nowadays, there's so many more papers being published. And I think peer reviewers don't realize that there is a fraction of the papers that they might peer review are fraudulent. Yeah, a fraction, but still, it's the credibility thing that gets affected here. It does. And it's, you know, talking about science misconduct could lead people to think that all science is flawed. But that's that's not the case. I do want to stress that. And it's really important to realize we're talking about a fraction, a couple of rotten apples in a fruit basket. But I like to think that the rest of the fruit basket is still beautiful.