I'm Stephen Dubner and this is Freakonomics Radio.

If you are new to the show, you might assume from its name that we deal with straight ahead

economics, employment, cost of living, things like that.

But if you've been listening for a while, you know we don't do that much straight ahead

economics.

We tend to favor stories like the economics of sleep.

And we find that permanently increasing sleep by an hour per week increases wages by about

4.5%.

We do stories about the significance of the lowly pencil.

You realize there isn't a single person in the world who would really understand how

to make a pencil from scratch.

We even made a show about the unlikely triumph of the belt.

If he was a very rotund gentleman, he might have made suspenders popular instead of belts.

But this week's show does deal with a straight ahead economic issue.

It's about an idea whose time finally may have come.

An idea that may present a solution to two separate problems.

The first problem is that a lot of full-time jobs in the modern economy simply don't

pay a living wage.

The second problem is that even a lot of those jobs may not be around for long.

Eric Brinyolfson is an MIT professor who deals with the economics of technology.

We're now beginning to have machines be able to augment and automate our brains and replace

mental tasks.

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