Russ Roberts on the Least Pleasant Jobs

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4.7 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 21 April 2008

⏱️ 64 minutes

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Summary

EconTalk host Russ Roberts talks about the claim that for capitalism to succeed there have to be people at the bottom to do the unpleasant tasks and that the rich thrive because of the suffering of those at the bottom. He critiques the idea that capitalism is a zero sum game where to get ahead, someone has to fall back. He also looks at the evolution of the least pleasant jobs over time and how technology interacts with rising productivity to make the least pleasant jobs more pleasant.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:12.5	I'm your host Russ Roberts of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover
0:17.3	Institution.
0:18.7	Our website is econtalk.org where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast,
0:25.8	and find links to other information related to today's conversation.
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0:36.8	Before introducing today's guest, I want to give you a summary of the recent survey we
0:40.7	did of listeners.
0:42.5	We put the survey up for about two weeks, not very long, and I know many of you found
0:46.5	out about it after it was already down, sorry about that, but we'll do another one down
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0:53.8	But even in that short time, over 500 people went to the econtalk homepage at econtalk.org
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	...

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