Today's show is the first of two episodes about employment and of course unemployment considering

what's been happening with the COVID-19 pandemic. It is especially about re-employment,

that is what kind of jobs are coming back and when and which jobs aren't coming back.

So we will hear from a labor economist with the Federal Reserve, another economist who

used to work in the White House and the Department of Labor, another economist who thinks

that even before the pandemic we had automated away too many jobs and another person who shares

that view about jobs and automation, the former presidential candidate Andrew Yang who's called

for a universal basic income has become a lot more urgent in the past few months.

But these two episodes are also about prisoners, specifically prisoners and re-employment

and we'll ask whether that research can tell us anything about COVID-19 re-employment generally.

We are living through an historic disruption, a jolt to the labor markets that was unimaginable

just a few months ago. There will be books and books written about it and 50 years from now it

will show up in economics textbooks, maybe they'll call it then what we're calling it now.

The Great Labor Reallocation of 2020.

From Stitcher and Dubner Productions this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores

the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Steven Dubner.

We'll start today with a particularly interesting researcher.

My name is Jennifer Dooliac and I'm an economics professor and the director of the Justice Tech Lab

at Texas A&M University. What is the Justice Tech Lab? It is a research group that focuses on

empirical research related to crime and discrimination. So we try to find answers to some of our trickier

policy problems. Dooliac did not set out to become a crime economist. It kind of assumed I would be

an investment banker like every other econ major. But she repeatedly found herself drawn to the topic.

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