You Should Worry About the July Jobs Report

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0:53So Justin, you spend all your time thinking about the economy. I'm sort of wondering, how concerned are you about the jobs report that came out last week? Worry. You're an optimist, I should say. I know. Like you being worried actually makes me worried. Justin Wolfers is an economist at the University of Michigan and the guy behind Platypus Economics. Betsy got me this the other day. His name's Hoppy the Hoptimist. Betsy's your partner. this is a this is what is how do i describe what this is hoppy is um a big mouth with a big spring in between with a big love heart at this point in the conversation justin was holding up this little plastic toy if you want to see it you can go to youtube but picture a kind of bobble head with a slinky for a mouth you bop it on the head it gives you a goofy spring-loaded smile Every time I'm feeling down, I just come and tap Hoppy.

1:51At least I feel a little better. Betsy got me Hoppy because of the jobs report. She saw how down I looked. If you haven't guessed, last week's job report was bad. It showed the American economy lost 23 ,000 jobs in July, even though economists had predicted we might gain up to 80 ,000. it also revised down numbers for previous months. All in all, it meant the US gained 200 ,000 fewer jobs than we thought over the last three months. It's been a roller coaster the last year and a half. And it's been emotionally very draining. You can't get around the fact that this has been incredibly chaotic. You can't get around the fact that many of our biggest economic challenges are self-inflicted wounds, trade wars, shipping out all the immigrants.

2:45The problem is coming from inside the house. What do you mean when you say that? These are caused by the White House. These job losses. Yeah. These 23 ,000 jobs gone. Look, I'll tell you, you and I were both working during the 2008 financial crisis. For folks who don't remember, it was terrifying. And really, I'd go home and I was trying to make sense of it. Honestly, I couldn't make sense of it. One of the few things that helped me sleep at night, is it Ben Bernanke was the Fed chair? Hmm. Like a grown-up was in charge. Yeah, and I knew if anyone was up to that moment, it was Ben. Obviously, this is not the case these days.

3:25And for Justin, it makes bad news like this jobs report even worse. Why was this number the number that got your attention? Because I got to say, like, I look around and I'm already worried about the economy. I see the war in Iran. I see tariff shenanigans. And this just seemed like of a piece. But I could tell this actually really got to you. The good news is we're not in a recession. The bad news is there's a lot of bad news that's sort of been building up. Some of it might have stuck its head up above water. And, you know, I'm just sort of worried about what the next few months hold. Today on the show, Justin's worried about the next few months.

4:11So should you be? I'm Mary Harris. You're listening to What Next. Stick around.

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5:55Okay, I want to set the scene going into last week's jobs report a little bit. Because we're in this moment where the Trump administration has been playing defense on the economy. They've been claiming everything's fine, pay no attention to your feelings, etc., etc. So much so that I would say there's been some denial of reality. Wait, from the Trump administration? Well, like, okay, I'll give one example. Last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson was on CNBC's Squawk Box, and he said he was getting sick of people talking about the K-shaped economy, the idea that, like, the rich are getting richer, the poor getting poorer, you know, their prospects going down.

6:35He said he thinks, oh, it's going to be a C-shaped economy where, you know, just picture it, picture it with me. You know, we're coming together, the lower branches going up. First of all, is that true? I just like the fact Scott Besson's sick of the K-shaped economy. I know. So am I. Aren't we all? Yeah. Mate, welcome to the club. And good news, Scott. You're the Treasury Secretary. You have a little bit of power here. One thing you could do is not pass a budget that is the largest redistribution from poor to rich in a single bill in America's history. Just an idea. Just spitballing. Just a thought.

7:11I've got another idea. just if you want ideas. Tariffs are a regressive tax that take from the poor. Maybe we could back off on that. I don't know. Not likely. Just a thought. Right. You know what? Like, actually, this administration's got all these popular and populist ideas about how it wants to help work new middle class Americans. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on social security. I don't love them, but I noticed something in the budget, those all expired a couple of days after the next election. But the tax cuts for the rich you made permanent. Hey, Scott, Scott, one thing you could do is if you actually care is you could make permanent the stuff that helps working in middle class Americans.

7:52And maybe we'll just make temporary the stuff that redistributes to the rich. Just spitballing. Sorry. Just an idea. You just pressed my, I just got, I'm just going to have to go back to Hoppy the Hoptimist. Yeah. Okay. So that's the environment in which these job numbers come out on Friday. And what they showed was, you know, we were expecting modest, what's called modest growth, 80 ,000 jobs. And does this mean like 80 ,000 new jobs injected into the economy? Is that we're talking about here? On net. So literally each month, millions of people get fired, roughly 3 million and roughly 3 million get hired.

8:31But when one of those numbers is bigger than the others, say we hire 3.1 and fire three, then we say we created 100 ,000 jobs. And that's roughly speaking what we're hoping for, but actually more people got fired than hired. Yeah, the report showed we'd actually lost 23 ,000 jobs. And not just that, but it revised down previous month's numbers where we thought there had been some growth. It was actually like, not really that much growth. Dumb question. Does that mean that maybe this number that you didn't love, that we lost 23 ,000 jobs, that could then be revised down even further in coming months?

9:08Yes. It could also be revised up. Okay. So this whole revision thing is very tricky. And why do we not know what the number is? Because it's hard to know. So it's a very difficult thing measuring an economy of the size, complexity, and the degree of constant change as the US economy. So basically what the Bureau of Labor Statistics does is it calls up a bunch of firms and it says how many people are on your payrolls and then it calls them back the next month and so on. Now, the good thing is if it calls all the big firms, then it's actually getting a lot of employment. So that's why this is a better number than there's another way of measuring it, which is you call people instead of calling firms.

9:48And you say like, has anyone lost their job in your house? What's the employment situation? Yep. And that's what's called the household survey. So we do do both, but we tend to focus on the firm survey, the payroll survey. It's more reliable. Yeah. Now here's the problem. Let me say I've surveyed a hundred firms. It's actually much more than that. And then what I need to do is realize that's a share of all firms. And so then all I need to do is blow that number up by what share of it is it of all firms. Here's the problem. how many firms are there in America? Many. No one knows. Okay. Because every day, new businesses are being born and old businesses are dying.

10:32And so we know what happened with this one sample of firms, but we don't know how many, how representative they are, how many new firms were born and how many old firms died, which means we don't actually know. So that's a big part of it. Now, that's actually a very deep problem. We re-benchmark once a year, never look up the word benchmark. But the other problem is literally some firms send in their forms late. When I said literally, I meant that in the Joe Biden sense of not literally because they connect their computers and they don't always have forms. But when there's a lot to do at work, sometimes you don't answer the government straight away.

11:11and the revisions come because as you wait longer, more forms come back and therefore you know more about the truth. So the old estimate is just like the new estimate but in every way worse. It has fewer firms. And then you could say, well, if these revisions are such a big deal, why do we even bother with following this? And the answer is every other economic indicator is worse. So this is the most timely, least bad way of figuring out what's going on. Here's a weird thing about these numbers. While the job loss is happening, it seems, also unemployment is low, like seems pretty good. It's at 4.1%.

11:54How do you square those things? Let me give a short-run answer and a long-run answer. If the long run is more important, the short run is what most journalists ask about. So what we had was actually the number of jobs in the economy probably shrank last week. Notice I said probably because we don't know the truth. We just know the measure. it. Now, the thing is, the unemployment rate is the share of the labour force that is unemployed. To be unemployed requires a few things, one of which is joblessness. But beyond being jobless, you also have to be ready and willing to work and searching. So if there are fewer jobs, but a bunch of folks give up searching, then unemployment falls.

12:30So the language economics journalists sometimes use here is unemployment fell for bad reasons or the wrong reason. And And that's simple language. So unemployment fell because people are giving up. Right. And that language is roughly correct, and that's roughly helpful. So that's what happened this month. Mary, I think the more interesting thing is pan back and look at the last two years. So you can say there are three different lenses you could look at this. You say, what happened this month? The unemployment rate fell, and that's what people in Washington will do. You could say, what happened over the last six months?

13:02It's actually been falling slightly, which is quite good. But slightly there's doing a lot of work. So you can just pan back and say what's happened over the past two years or year and a half if you want to be political. And it turns out unemployment's been basically stable. That's really important because at the same time job growth has been really low. So what does that mean? Right. So we've been through an emotional rollercoaster up and down. But basically the first artifacts are we've created very few jobs and unemployment has remained remarkably stable. A large part of this is we are all having to learn a new language for what does a low immigration economy look like.

13:38You see, what normally happens is the US population normally grows. And if it normally grows, there are more workers, but also there are more people buying more stuff. So the ongoing, what happens is we're naturally creating more jobs just to keep the new workers employed. There's a concept that people on Wall Street talk about, they call it break-even jobs growth. How many jobs does the economy need to create each month in order to keep up with the fact that more people are being born than are dying or born and arriving than are dying or leaving? And so back in the late Biden years, that was probably 150 ,000 jobs.

14:12And so people have an instinct, which is if we're not creating 150 ,000 jobs, the economy is going backwards. But that's not right because what's happened is we've basically stopped immigration. and the US population is awfully close to stalling, which means - Feels like we're in neutral. On population growth, yes. Yeah. Which basically means the number of jobs we need to keep up with the not growing population - Smaller. Much smaller. Yeah. And there's a range of estimates here. So at the low end, some people could say if we create zero jobs, that's enough to keep up with the fact that the working age population is barely growing.

14:52At the higher end, some people might say 80 ,000 jobs is what we need. You know, given it used to be 150, maybe 80, you know, probably a respectable number that's close to the consensus would be we need to create 30 ,000 or 40 ,000 jobs a month. So now you can see how we could have very low job growth if it had averaged 30 ,000 or 40 ,000 a month. That's enough to keep the unemployment rate stable. And actually for a low immigration economy, that's okay. If we can keep that, if we can keep creating the number of jobs we need and it just happens we need less, obviously tough for the immigrants who can't come in and start lives and tough for the businesses for whom part of their growth story had always been, well, as the American population grows, we'll get a bigger and bigger market.

15:38We'll be able to sell more stuff. The growth thing seems to be the real problem, which is like it just seems like everyone is stuck in this scenario. Yes. Not really moving up. And so one of the biggest stories that we don't talk about, because there's so much to talk about, is what does a low population growth economy look like? Because the US has not slowly eased its way into it the way other countries did. The US threw on the brake. And even if you thought in the long run it would work out, that could cause a lot of weird repercussions in the short run. And we haven't had time to talk about it because we've been talking about wars and trade wars and every other damn thing.

16:17So we're just going to live it. Welcome to 2026. You know, look, Mary, you started by asking about my emotional reaction to this. And you know, I think the only advice I give people is Botox is the way. Botox is now an economist's best friend. It's the only way to erase - Because it keeps you happy? Keeps you looking perky? Look how smooth my furrowed is. The worry's gone. Yeah. Calgon, take me away. I know that's goofy because you talk to people from media and lots of people in entertainment and media do this, but for a middle-aged academic economist, that's not a thing we do. But I have needed to do it.

17:00Otherwise, my furrowed lines would just be terrible. This has transformed into a self-care show. Can we talk about whether men should do Botox? I feel like there's not enough discussion about that, Mary.

17:16We'll be right back after a quick break.

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19:10okay here's what i thought when i saw these jobs numbers i thought there's been a lot of debate in some circles especially online about whether americans are not really understanding economic data because a lot of americans have been pessimistic they've said the economy is bad and yet at the same time it seems like the economy the fundamentals are okay I looked at these jobs numbers and I thought, is this the numbers catching up with the people? Like reflecting actually what people are experiencing on a delay? We're like a ship at sea and you gaze up at the stars. And you can probably tell from the stars.

19:47If you can see the Southern Cross, you're in the Southern Hemisphere. And if you can see, what stars do you have in America, Mary? What stars do we have in America? Okay. Orion's belt is like the one I know. I love Orion's belt. It's my favorite belt. Good belt. Three little stars in a row. Yeah, those ones. Aren't they called the saucepan or something? Maybe. So many people are going to be at us in the comments. I know. Get on your astronomy, people. Anyway. They're just like you didn't call it astrology. Anyway, continue.

20:22So we never really know. What we can do is we can look up and see the stars and sort of know. we can put our finger in and realise that we're in the ocean and not on land. And a lot of people are feeling bad and it could be that they're feeling wrong or it could be that they're seeing reality and our statistics haven't caught up. And you've always got to be open to both possibilities. And so remember we talked about the firm survey says one thing, the household survey actually says that the US economy has been shedding jobs, which if true, would cohere with the sort of doom and gloom. And I know people want better and sharper and straighter answers, but the only way to do that is to spend more money on economic statistics, which are expensive.

21:01Yeah. Okay. Here are some things I didn't get about the jobs data that I want you to straighten out for me. First of all, the stock market seemed totally unfazed by them, like actually sort of zazzed. Why is that? Stock market's having a weird moment. So there are occasional weird moments where, so look, you're right, we just learned the US economy is doing worse than you think, so therefore you would think the value of firms that sell stuff to Americans should be lower. Yes. Your intuition is exactly right. Occasionally the stock market is like, I am convinced that the Fed is about to make a mistake, and they're worried that the Fed was going to raise rates, which might really slow the economy.

21:39And so if this data prevents the Fed from making a mistake, and it's true these numbers will make it less likely we get a rise in interest rates, then the stock market celebrates the fact that fate intervened and prevented the Fed from making a mistake. So this is like a woo, cheap money. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're all very excited that interest rates can be lower for longer. It's not a game I'm particularly a fan of, partly because it's absolutely correct to say the Fed could make a mistake, but what's less clear is which mistake it will make. The Fed could have interest rates too high, I could also have them too low.

22:17So this sort of story of bad news is good news, as the financial press calls it, doesn't make a lot of sense if you're a little more humble. And I always like to preach intellectual humility here. If you're a little more humble and you don't know which mistake the Fed's going to make. Yeah. Okay. There's also interesting data showing that Americans are still spending money. Like even people who don't have a lot are still doing discretionary spending. And so I don't know how to fit that understanding into what we've just talked about, about the job market being weaker than we thought. Right. So welcome to economics.

22:57There are conflicting signals and your job is to try to figure out the golden thread that runs through them, that recognizes that they're all messy indicators. Some of them are probably wrong. The economic, social and political meaning of these things changes through time. The measurement technologies are constantly changing and nothing, no measurement is ever perfect. So thank goodness we're not architects because if we economists are architects, there would be a lot of leaning towers of Pisa. So I think you're right though, to what you always want to do whenever you've got a story is stress tested against other sources of information.

23:30And so if the story is the economy is weak and people are miserable, that doesn't cohere with reasonably strong consumer spending. You can tell tortured stories, but generally speaking, if I'm worried about the future, I pull back. If I'm excited about the future, I go and buy all the avo toast. Let me just recommend to your audience, avocado toast is amazing. But do you think that's what's happening here? Do you think people are basically like indulging themselves where they can? That sounds like a complicated story. I still think the overall story surely is if you feel more optimistic, you spend more.

24:07So I'm not drawn to the story you just told. A different possibility that threads the line is the economy's doing okay, which, by the way, is quite embarrassing to liberals who've wanted to preach doom and gloom, right? So if I think two things could be true, the president's done a bunch of genuinely stupid things and the economy might be the little engine that could and if you want to be optimistic, you call it an A-, and if you want to be pessimistic, you call it a B+. And people are kind of spending as if they're in that range. Now you've still got another problem, which is then why do people tell pollsters they're so miserable?

24:43And that, I don't want to get a story that's too complicated, but, you know, one, increasingly when you ask people how the economy's doing, they answer the question instead, what do you think of the President? and people are really unhappy at the president also how you feel about the economy might be changed by whether this is what feels like dark impersonal forces like inflation rather than things that are in your control and there are a lot of dark impersonal forces right now inflation a war ai but we've just said that like we're losing jobs that people like that you know so So I guess, and that is a real thing.

25:20We think. We think. We don't know. Look, I might never be allowed in a room full of economists again. I want to know, Justin. I want a final answer. It's not that the emperor here being economists are wearing no clothes, but we've sort of got a robe on and we're a little bit hulled in the corner. And the truth is, look, two things can be true. We don't know with any certainty what's going on. and I still know better than other people. It could be that economics gives us the least fuzzy look at a very fuzzy picture. Okay. I mean, the Trump administration is walking right into that ambiguity. They're looking at these jobs numbers.

26:04They are saying, listen, there's evidence here that there's re-industrialization happening. Can we just be a little more honest? It's very polite of you to say that they're walking into that fuzziness. They would say what they're saying no matter what the truth is. That's fair. And there hasn't been a moment of truth come out of happy Kevin Hassett. Happy Kevin. There hasn't been a moment of truth come out of Secretary Bessent. And President Trump recently declared he deserved a 150 % economic approval rating, which you don't even need to have gotten plus third grade math to think is problematic on its face.

26:46Yeah. As I've been sitting with these numbers and how much we don't know about what's happening, I've been thinking about what we do know, which is like we really do know that there's trouble ahead. And I say that not because of jobs numbers or anything else, But because a year ago, Congress passed the one big, beautiful bill, there were big cuts in there to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy and for lots of people, but for the wealthy. Cuts to food assistance, cuts to Medicaid, cuts that are going to go online shortly, basically. So if you don't like the numbers you're seeing now, Justin Wolfers, does knowing that mean, is that part of your understanding here?

27:42that like this will get worse because as much as Scott Besson says he doesn't like that K-shaped economy, essentially the Trump administration is like putting its elbow on the neck of that lower K and essentially saying, yeah, health care, we don't care if that's affordable, food stamps, I don't know if you need those, that sort of thing. Yes. And the issues here are so serious, I'm not going to pretend to joke about them. Yeah. The cuts to food stamps. Food stamps in the United States gives you$6 a week to help put food on the table. We have a safety net with all sorts of holes in it. And if we're in an economy where everyone can find work, that might be okay.

28:32But capitalist economies do not always work that way. And there are times in all of our lives, This is not them. This is not other people. This could be your parents get divorced. It could be an injury at work. It could be a miscarriage that puts you out of the office for a while. And you might find yourself on food stamps. And if you don't, your cousin will or your neighbour will. And what the administration has done over recent months is kicked 4 million people off food stamps. Yep. I made a video. And that's the beginning. We really have to say that's the beginning. Like, more cuts are coming.

29:12Yeah, and if you think about it for even a few short seconds and you have a heart, you might cry. Economics can feel abstract. And the numbers that we sometimes deal with when you're talking about the top end of town are really big. But when you're talking about$6 a day and the difference between being able to put food on the table for your kids or not, because the amount of need out there for food assistance has not gone down. So we have an economic theory. Well, it might go up. I mean, like the Senate just voted to give the president additional tariff powers. Right, so stuff at the store costs more.

29:50We're not going to give folks. And, you know, these are also the folks who the war in Iran, a larger share of low-income households, fuel and food, is a much larger share of their budget than it is for the rest of us. So the war in Iran was a regressive tax. The tariffs were a regressive tax. And then we ripped the safety net. We haven't ripped it away. We've just torn huge holes in it. And it's a very complicated way they've done it. But basically, the federal government has given states an incentive to say, you don't qualify for food stamps, even if you do. They've basically said, if you make the mistake of kicking someone off food stamps who needs it, the federal government, which typically pays the bill for this, says, that's fine by us.

30:31Right. Not a problem. I would like Scott Bessent to knock on that family's door and tell them. I know I sound sanctimonious now, mate, but I do think there are some issues where the stakes are very, very real. And these jokers feel like they're playing games. But at the end of the day, the reason we think about economics is because we care about people and we care about their lives and we want them to live lives of dignity. And that is being taken from people right now. you know later this week we're going to get more numbers inflation numbers wednesday i know how's that data going to mix with what we just talked about this jobs information so it's a really big deal because um okay i'm going to give you the most boring pivot in economics it's the most standard let's turn to the fed the reason we always talk about the fed is because everyone understands what how to do that very easily basically the Fed is at a point right now where before this jobs number is thought the job market was okay, inflation was too high, it was going to hike rates to slow the economy to knock inflation down.

31:36Now we learned that maybe the labour market's not okay, although maybe it is. I want to make sure we hold that full story there, but definitely. And then inflation's a little bit too high. And so what you have is, you know, we went from a difficult situation to a devilishly hard one. inflation is going to tell us how much has the cost of living risen therefore how far behind are ordinary americans falling because prices are what are rising faster than wages that that thing you feel it's a reality but if that's a higher number that's more likely to lead the fed to raise rates which would be more likely to slow the economy further which would endanger the one great part of the current economy which is that unemployment has been remarkably stubbornly happily low, which makes me so happy.

32:25So look, this isn't a football game. So cheering from the sidelines doesn't make a difference. Well, actually, I'm told that doesn't make a difference at football either. I've tried though. If inflation is high and we have this jobs report, that's bad, right? That's bad. So if you want the work of the day, we call that a supply shock when you get higher prices and less economic activity. And that's two bad things happening at the same time. A supply shock reflects the cost of doing business going up. And so then you might say, how is it possible the cost of doing business has gone up? And then I would simply point you to the war on Iran and the closure of the Strait of Hamas, ongoing tariffs and immigration making it harder for folks to find the workers that they need.

33:11So three self-inflicted supply shocks. There was a period where we went literally decades without a supply shock. In fact, when we teach Economics 101, sometimes we'd get to that bit and we'd be like, oh, do I have to teach that? That was about the 1970s. And it turns out - This is a self-imposed supply shock, potentially. Yeah. Now, we had some that were not self-imposed. That's really terrific news. We had COVID and we had Russia invading Ukraine. They were other supply shocks. So they were not self-imposed. But then we got to the 2024 election and we started imposing our own, I guess, you know, who doesn't enjoy a supply shock?

33:46Everyone. Sorry. that was me being glib or sarcastic or just dealing with my issues. I mean, I don't know how you spin your eye out of that, though. I mean, I'm sure they'll try. I'm sure the administration will try. Mary, I'm sort of at a point, maybe it's interesting for your audience to draw you out on this. Why do we keep talking about what the administration says? Because there's no one. They're in charge still. But there's no information. They don't do what they say they'll do. What's true, they don't talk about. what's false, they do talk about. There's this old journalistic impulse to report on what happened in Washington, I guess because they're the guys in charge.

34:25But the number of times I've been asked to comment on things where the answer is this is false on its face, why are we talking about it? And I'm not saying this about you, Mary. No, no. But I sort of wonder why we keep talking about this. How will they spin their way out of it? They won't. They'll lie. It's easy. They don't need to spin when you can lie. Right. That's right. Right. It makes the job a lot easier, by the way. They used to have to employ highly qualified analysts to go searching for the one fact that went their way. Now they just make them up. That, by the way, is not a joke. But you still trust the numbers?

34:59You still trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics? This is like a whole other thing. I'm grateful. I probably. No, no, no. I am very grateful you asked me that question. Okay. I'm sick of it, but it's not your fault. It's the administration's fault. the information environment for regular folks is just unbelievably hard because you have falsehood after falsehood being pumped out as from the administration those of us who know all the acronyms in washington know that there's a distinction between what's called an independent statistical agency the bureau of labor statistics the census bureau the bureau of economic analysis and political actors um the political actors basically anyone whose name is secretary they lie all the time the independent statistical agencies always relentlessly tell you their best albeit imperfect estimate of the truth and so that's made stuff hard because every time you hear a statement now you have to find out who said it and then it gets even worse which is for instance the Bureau of Economic Analysis lives under the Commerce Department everything the Commerce Department says is a lie but everything the Bureau of Economic Analysis says is true and sometimes the Commerce Department lies about what the Bureau of Economic Analysis is saying.

36:10So I think it's hard. For folks at home, you can either learn the alphabet soup or you can find people you can trust. And if what you want to do is not talk about numbers anymore, I think it's a great failure. I think the failure is the administrations. I think what's even worse is I want folks at home to realise you, your taxes are paying for these numbers and they're much less useful if no one knows what to believe, which is another way of saying the administration is burning your tax dollars in order for its department of propaganda to keep lying to you, even as we're actually creating facts.

36:44And yes, that also gets me mad. Well, it's just confusing. It's super confusing. The people in charge of the independent agency are the political actors, right? So theoretically, they could be messing around with stuff. No. But it sounds like you trust the actual statisticians. No, they couldn't be. So the thing is, these independent statistical agencies, the number of people involved in putting together the data for non-farm payrolls or the unemployment rate is very, very large. Those people are not political actors. They have a, I know them, their friends, their past students, their colleagues.

37:15They have a dedication and devotion to the truth. And yes, someone high above could try to change the numbers. But the thing is, the only way you could do that is dozens of people would know on the inside. And I guarantee you, one of them would call me by the end of the afternoon. And Mary, I'll make you a promise. If one of them call me, I will call you and we will tell your audience. Deal. Deal. Let's do that. Yeah. Justin, it's always a wild ride to have you on the show. I'm grateful for you. Thank you. Thanks, Mary. Let's do something. Can you say something happy? I want to bring a picture on a happy mind.

37:52Get out your little plastic guy. Let's bounce him around. I'll be the optimist. Be optimistic, everyone. There's always something beautiful out the window, and there is. I want to share with people. I met Mary's beautiful family this week, and they gave me every reason to be optimistic about our future. Justin, I'm grateful for you. Thank you.

38:15Justin Wolfers is an economist and professor at the University of Michigan. You can check out his work over at Platypus Economics. And that's our show. What Next is produced by Rob Gunther, Evan Campbell, Madeline Thames-Ducharme, and Patrick Fort. Paige Osborne is the senior supervising producer of What Next and What Next TBD. Mia LaBelle is the executive producer of podcasts here at Slate. Ben Richmond is the senior director of podcast operations here. And I'm Mary Harris. Go track me down on Blue Sky. Say hello. I'm Matt Mary Harris. Thanks for listening. Catch you back here next time.

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