Platypus Economics with Justin Wolfers

What happens when a president wants lower interest rates—but the economy, inflation, and bond markets are all pushing the other way?
In this episode of What Next with Mary Harris from Slate, Justin Wolfers explains why the latest fight over interest rates is about much more than one Federal Reserve meeting.
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Justin Wolfers and Bloomberg columnist Stacey Vanek Smith slow down to unpack the one number that quietly shapes your paycheck: labor's share of income. For most of modern history, workers took home about two-thirds of the pie. Today it's down to 53% — and the rest goes to the people who own the companies, not the ones who show up to work. Then the stakes get bigger.
Justin argues that past $100 million, the only thing money buys is power — and in an election decided by 115,000 votes, one billionaire's checkbook could theoretically swing thousands more. The same logic drives the AI question: the same technology makes your life utopian if you own the robot and dystopian if your boss does.
From the first-ever live edition of Off the Clock, recorded at Stanford.
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The September jobs report landed with a thud: just 29,000 jobs created, well short of the 80,000–90,000 forecasters expected, with July and August both revised down and unemployment ticking up to 4.2%. In this episode of Diving In, Justin Wolfers walks you through why those numbers are disappointing by historical standards — yet why unemployment can still stay low and stable at the same time.
Then there's your paycheck. Wage growth has slumped to around 3% — slower than prices — so if you feel like you can't keep up, you're not imagining it. Justin explains what weak wages mean for the Fed, why a rate hike now looks more likely in December than October, and why Wall Street shrugged.
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Every dollar you spend having your money actively managed by someone in a sports car is paying for that sports car. In this Professor Is In episode, Justin Wolfers takes questions after his keynote at Stanford's Initiative for Financial Decision Making and lands on the core ideas he thinks every personal finance course must teach.
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Most of us wash our hands even though we've never seen a germ. But when it comes to personal finance, hardly anyone "washes their hands" — and the mistakes are expensive. Justin Wolfers, back from a Stanford keynote to finance educators, argues that ignoring sound financial advice may cost people somewhere between 2% and 10% of their lifetime consumption — putting it in the same neighborhood as the welfare cost of climate change, and dwarfing the 0.1–1% economists usually assign to business cycles.
So why won't people listen? Because the public doesn't trust economists: surveys show they rank barely above politicians in favorability. Justin makes the case that the fix isn't more experts screaming about interest rates — it's using plainer speech, telling better stories, showing real empathy, and laying out one clear action at a time. Here's what's in it for you: the employer match you're leaving on the table, the credit card interest compounding daily while your cash sits in savings, the actively managed fund quietly skimming your returns. Small mistakes, moved across a lifetime, add up to real money — yours.
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