He writes,

Are there fields where “people hire people smarter than themselves” (smarter, better, faster, tougher, sexier, whatever) and conversely, fields where decision makers are afraid to do so?

Off hand, I would say that in tech fields the advice is to hire the smartest person you can, and if they are smarter than you, then so be it. I never regretted hiring the smartest people. In at least one case, the person climbed higher than me on the ladder, but that did not trouble me. It felt like a positive-sum game.

I would guess that in situations where it feels like a zero-sum game, things are quite different. My guess is that it is more likely to feel like a zero-sum game in a non-profit.

His next question.

Why, for example, are many history Ph.D.s driving cabs (now Uber) and not teaching high school?

I am not sure that having a Ph.D is predictive of having the skills or the inclination to teach high school. I teach at a private high school in a very positive environment where the students want to achieve, and it still can be unpleasant and unrewarding at times. Moreover, as a volunteer, I get to opt out of a lot of the garbage jobs that paid teachers are expected to do.

If I had to make a living, and if you gave me the choice between teaching at the median public high school and working for Uber, then I’d be an Uber driver.

Well, I mentioned him a couple weeks ago. Now, John Cochrane says that Moretti and Chang-Tai Hsieh have a new working paper. They claim that the wage differentials between cities are productivity differentials. Instead, they might be cost-of-living differentials. Or, to be more precise, cost-of-living-among-affluent-people differentials.

He writes,

The proportion of part-time workers has been rising: both those who prefer it that way and those who would rather have a full-time job. So is the number of temporary workers, whether employed through agencies or on their own. So are the numbers of workers on fixed-term contracts and independent contractors, many of whom are doing the same work as they once did as regular employees. These are all good-faith members of the labor force; they are employed but without what used to be thought of as a regular job.

Pointer from Mark Thoma.

My guess is that the most important policy variable influencing this is the requirement that full-time employment come with health insurance. “Casualization” is the market’s way of working around this requirement, which has become increasingly onerous as medical treatments have become more intensive in their use of physical capital (devices of all sorts) and human capital (medical specialists).

She scolds,

There is no better example of the folly of the elites than the current fashion for a universal basic income among both liberals and libertarians. Instead of trying to figure out something hard, like how to build an economy that provides adequate work for everyone, the idea is to do something easy, like give them checks.

To which I reply, better to do something easy than something stupid. And if you assign the task “build an economy that provides adequate work for everyone” to technocrats and politicians, they will come back with something stupid.

Leave the hard work of actually creating jobs to entrepreneurs. I do not promise that they will “provide adequate work for everyone,” but they will tend to create patterns of sustainable specialization and trade. As for government policy, my first thought on jobs policy is always to reduce the payroll tax and to de-link health insurance from employment.

The question is

How much of the decline in labor market fluidity is driven by the decline in geographic fluidity, and how much of the decline in geographic fluidity is driven by 2-income households? Especially when the two incomes are in different industries, the problem of trying to match 2 people in a new geographical location gets tough and the opportunity cost of 1 person requiring several months to find a new fit in a new location is large.

Intuitively, this would seem to be a big factor. I wonder what the trend is like in faculty mobility. I believe that there has been a large secular rise in the number of two-professor households, and unless at least one is a superstar, my guess is that mobility options are quite limited.