Podcasts · Government

Optimist Economy

Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi

70 episodes

Optimist Economy is the anti-doomscroll economics podcast. Work rules, tax fairness, healthcare, housing costs, retirement security — the economic forces shaping American life have real problems. But also real solutions. Each week, economist Kathryn Anne Edwards and editor Robin Rauzi break down one problem and solution with data, history, humor, and a belief that tools to build a better economy exist. We just haven't tried them. New episodes on Tuesdays.

More about the show

✨ Support the podcast at: optimisteconomy.com ✨

Ask questions or share your economic worries with us at: optimist.economy@gmail.com

Episodes page 1 of 2

  1. Immigration Economics Part II: Smaller is Worse

    · 41 min · S2 E31

    Over a year into the administration's anti-immigration agenda, we’re seeing the economic fallout. For the first time in at least 50 years, estimates are that we lost immigrants on net; far fewer than usual arrived and…

  2. Americans Feel Awful About the Economy

    · 48 min · S2 E30

    The Consumer Sentiment Index has tracked how Americans experience the U.S. economy through bouts of runaway inflation, a mortgage crisis, stock market bubbles, and six recessions. And yet the scores right now are lower…

  3. The U.S. is in the Hole. Will We Stop Digging?

    · 52 min · Explicit

    (Originally aired June 10, 2025) The national debt is $36 trillion. That could be a panic-inducing big number. So maybe it will help to understand how we ran up that debt. We've blown 37% of it on tax cuts, with…

  4. Occupy! An Unfinished Uprising: The Invitation (Ep. 1)

    · 38 min

    Optimist Economy is on break this month, but we know that optimist listeners are interested in tales of economic history, issues of inequality and movements for change. So we thought some of you might enjoy "Occupy!" a…

  5. Stop Donating Your Vacation Days to Your Boss

    · 50 min · S2 E28

    Nearly 90% of private-sector workers get paid vacation days from their job, but a Pew survey found 46% leave at least some of it on the table. Government survey data also show that the share of workers who are on…

  6. The Government is Already Paying for Your Health Insurance, Buddy

    · 48 min · S2 E27

    About 18% of U.S. GDP every year gets spent on health care. Half of that, 9%, is coming from the government, which is about the whole cost of other countries’ public health programs. In other words, for what the U.S.…

  7. Mr. Justin Time Sets a Cruel Work Schedule

    · 49 min · S2 E26

    Just-in-time scheduling lets an algorithm decide when — and whether — millions of people work. Surveys find 40% of shift workers (mostly in retail and food service) don’t know their schedule a week in advance. They can…

  8. Young Americans Should Be Raising Hell About Social Security

    · 44 min · S2 E25

    Nobody has more riding on any changes to Social Security than people under 40. The trust fund is currently projected to run dry in the fourth quarter of 2032, but it could be sooner. Every election, starting in…

  9. Simple Immigration Economics: Bigger is Better

    · 52 min

    (Originally aired 6/24/2025) One in five workers in the United States was born in another country. Without them, the country’s prime-age workforce would be shrinking, and thus so would our economy. So the calumny…

  10. America at 250: Case for the Defense

    · 53 min · S2 E23

    It’s the United States’ semiquincentennial … and one of us is not feeling it. The other is literally carrying a flag in her bag — and that’s just her road flag. Kathryn Anne Edwards makes her case for optimism right…

  11. Optimist Q&A: The AI Bubble, the Rapture, and Free Lunch

    · 52 min · S2 E22

    We can’t give financial advice. Or feedback on your 20-page tax proposal. But economist Kathryn Edwards did take a run at nearly 20 listener questions in under 60 minutes. Among them: Why care about birth rates if…

  12. Inflation Risk is the Wrong Recession Lesson

    · 50 min · S2 E21

    This might be the most dangerous economic assertion circulating today: the high inflation from 2021-2023 was caused by government stimulus. The talking point on the right goes: the third COVID-era stimulus checks…

  13. Make the Economy Work for Freelancers, Too (#askingforafriend)

    · 48 min · S2 E20

    Thirty million Americans, more or less, work for themselves. They freelance, do gig work, have solo LLCs, or — as a certain economist says — participate in “ non-employee employment.” The economics of their situation…

  14. About That College Grad Who Can’t Find a Job…

    · 59 min · S2 E19

    (Originally aired 7/1/2025) Newly minted college graduates are having a harder time landing that first job than in recent years. Is it AI? Is college useless? Is it a crisis? (No. No. And not yet…) College graduates…

  15. Should We Cherish the Ultra-Wealthy? (a.k.a. ‘The Cornfield’)

    · 43 min · S2 E18

    A certain kind of wealthy American has been griping out loud lately — about taxes, about progressive cities, about how unappreciated they are for the jobs they create, the stuff they buy, and the tips they hand out. A…

  16. No Overtime for the Supervisor of Sandwiches

    · 49 min · S2 E17

    It wasn’t just hourly factory jobs that were supposed to come with a 40-hour workweek. Even salaried jobs were supposed to get overtime pay, though very few do do anymore. Overtime protections are the only legal…

  17. Can the U.S. Go ‘Cashless?’

    · 44 min · S2 E16

    Cash is dirty, inconvenient, and so last century. Some 70% of Americans under age 50 think its days are numbered. But we still need those greenbacks, if as an alternative to banks. More than 4% of households are…

  18. The 2026 Economy: Make it Make Sense

    · 58 min · S2 E15

    Consumer sentiment is in the basement. Jobs aren't being added. Prices keep climbing. GDP barely grew at the end of 2025, and a ‘meh’ 2% last quarter. Shouldn’t this be a recession? Not so far. Economist Kathryn Anne…

  19. Progress is a Long Game

    · 50 min · S2 E14

    (Originally aired 5/06/25) What sparks progress? The right political conditions? Social pressure? Economic upheaval? In response to two listeners’ questions, we say… both none of those and all of the above. As an…

  20. The Great Wage Stagnation

    · 47 min · S2 E13

    Average U.S. wages have barely budged since the early '80s — and if you account for today's labor force being older and more college-educated, wage growth basically disappears. Economists have cycled through…

  21. Tax Reform Gone Wild

    · 46 min · S2 E12

    From California to Washington to New York, states are trying to tax the very rich. The press keeps rehashing whether millionaires and billionaires will flee those states. Wrong question. The more important one is why…

  22. Nobody's Pulling Up Stakes Anymore

    · 46 min · S2 E11

    Americans used to move a lot in search of opportunity. But in 2024, the share of Americans who moved at all hit a 76-year low. Barely 2% of us moved across state lines. Some of that is by choice: people are more…

  23. The Optimists Have Questions…

    · 54 min · S2 E10

    Fourteen questions. Zero softballs. Listeners from Tacoma to Montreal wrote in to ask about retirement savings, taxing capital gains, home-buyer assistance programs, corporate profits in the tariffs era, what one state…

  24. Corporate Profits Are Up. Their Tax Bill Should Be Too.

    · 42 min · S2 E9

    The corporate income tax rate got hacked nearly in half by the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act. So nine years later, how’s that working out? Corporations’ effective tax rate (about 9%) is lower than what the average American…

  25. If AI Gets Hired, America Can Handle It

    · 51 min · S2 E8

    Switchboard operators. Typists. Secretaries. Lots of factory workers. The economy has a long history of technology slowly eliminating not just jobs but entire occupations. The U.S. also has a long history of not doing…

  26. Boomers Didn’t Ruin Everything. Really.

    · 50 min · S2 E7

    The popular narrative is that baby boomers rode cheap houses and 401(k)s to wealth, dismantled the welfare state behind them, and left everyone else to fight over scraps. But conflating boomers and conservatives lets…

  27. Can $1,000 at Birth Make Us a Country of Savers?

    · 49 min · S2 E6

    “Trump Accounts” might evoke the president’s other side hustles, like gold-plated mobile phones or meme crypto coins. But these investment accounts for children are one of the actually beautiful things to come out of…

  28. Social Security Upgrades for Retirement's Realities

    · 58 min · S2 E5

    Economist Kathryn Anne Edwards is a Social Security fan girl. Would it be possible for her to love it even more? Yes, if the old-age insurance program got some updates to handle the messy, gradual and interrupted way…

  29. What The Actual Fed.

    · 53 min · S2 E4

    The Federal Reserve is in the news constantly these days. Beyond the regular will-they-or-won’t-they question on interest rates, there are multiple legal battles with implications for the central bank’s independence,…

  30. We Don't Have a Housing Shortage. We Have a Paycheck Shortage.

    · 45 min · S2 E3

    Recent polls show 54% now consider housing unaffordable and the cost of homeownership dominates Americans’ economic anxieties. The popular “abundance” narrative says there’s a housing shortage and suggests cutting…

  31. Affordability vs. the Poverty Line

    · 48 min · S2 E2

    An essay went viral by claiming that $140,000 is what a family of four needs to just get by — a number higher than what 70% of American households earn. Conservative economists called it idiotic. Kathryn dismissed it…

  32. $79 Trillion Worth of Income Inequality

    · 49 min · S2 E1

    Our own optimist economist Kathryn Anne Edwards worked on a research project several years ago to measure income inequality. Its massive headline number has taken on a life of its own in columns, talking points, memes.…

  33. We're Back with a Backlog of Optimism

    · 0:55 · Trailer

    Hey optimists! Season two of Optimist Economy is finally here. New episodes coming on Tuesdays starting January 27. More at www.optimisteconomy.com

  34. What’s the Skinny on Laws that Make Salaries Public?

    · 16 min · S1 E34

    Listener Max did his grad thesis on pay transparency laws in Colorado and found that they narrowed the gender wage gap by 8 cents on the dollar. But some big-name economists reported that such laws can actually reduce…

  35. Thanksgiving Prep: An Optimist’s Guide to Dinner Table Debate

    · 53 min · S1 E33 · Explicit

    Your drunk uncle calls Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Your crypto-bro cousin thinks tariffs make China pay. Your grandfather blames working women for tanking wage growth. Economist Kathryn Edwards takes on a dozen…

  36. Retcon on Season One (+ Executive Orderpalooza)

    · 41 min · S1 E32 · Explicit

    Optimist Economy got its start almost exactly one year ago with a phone call that began, "Hear me out…" Thirty-two episodes later we ask, “What have we done?” Mostly we conditioned ourselves to keep our eye on the ball…

  37. How Health Insurance Got Shackled to Jobs

    · 51 min · S1 E31 · Explicit

    Why is anyone’s health insurance tied to their job? It's because of a superintendent in Dallas, World War II wage freezes, a 1953 tax code quirk, and decades of inertia. This accident of history costs America $384…

  38. Optimist Q&A: Evidence for UBI, What to Do About Billionaires, and Where Will the U.S. Economy Be After Trump?

    · 52 min · S1 E30 · Explicit

    In the final Q&A of the season, economist Kathryn Edwards answers listener questions on recent universal basic income experiments, legislative budgeting tricks, and the value of more aggressive IRS auditing. She also…

  39. Can We Fix America's Broken Unemployment Insurance System?

    · 1 h 08 min · S1 E29 · Explicit

    Just how broken is Unemployment Insurance? Consider this: During every recession since the 1950s, the federal government has had to step in and prop it up. Of people looking for work, only half qualify for Unemployment…

  40. The Ghost Recession: A Brief Economic History of Now

    · 1 h 01 min · S1 E28 · Explicit

    The economic pain that Americans experienced in 2022-23 was dubbed the “vibesession,” suggesting that negative public sentiment was out of sync with a healthy economy. But what we were truly experiencing was more like…

  41. The Cash-for-Kids Study: Misread and Misrepresented

    · 50 min · S1 E27 · Explicit

    You might have heard recently that a years-long poverty study “found” that giving $333 monthly to kids with poor parents didn’t make a difference. But here's why that’s the wrong takeaway: The "Baby's First Years"…

  42. The Case for Going Big on Paid Leave

    · 55 min · S1 E26 · Explicit

    Paid family and medical leave is a confusing mess: only 27% of private-sector workers get paid leave from their employer. Some others are covered by state programs, but those vary. The rest of us scramble to patch…

  43. Aren’t Free School Meals a Conservative's Dream Policy?

    · 54 min · S1 E25 · Explicit

    Free breakfast and lunch for every public school student — an idea associated more with countries like Sweden and Finland — should instead be viewed as a truly American policy that liberals and conservatives can both…

  44. Looking Beyond the Unemployment Rate

    · 58 min · S1 E24 · Explicit

    The unemployment rate has been hovering around 4.2%. But in today’s highly unsettled economy, many people feel this headline number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t capture their economic struggles — from…

  45. GDP Was Never Going to Make You Happy

    · 53 min · S1 E23 · Explicit

    Gross Domestic Product is the big dog of economic numbers. But this measure of the economy’s size has massive blind spots. It ignores income inequality and citizens’ wellbeing. It rewards consumption and thus…

  46. How to Actually Help Young Men Struggling in Our Economy

    · 1 h 00 min · S1 E22 · Explicit

    The "boys and men crisis" conversation set in motion following the 2024 election is now shooting off in erratic directions, leading to a lot of hand-wringing about college enrollment, long-gone factory jobs, and “loss…

  47. What You Don’t Know About Poverty

    · 48 min · S1 E21 · Explicit

    About 11% of Americans have a household income that puts them below the official government threshold for poverty. Is poverty a state of being, or a risk? Are the poor people themselves the root cause of poverty? Or…

  48. Q&A Part 2: Working Two Jobs, Incentives vs. Handouts, the Gold Standard, and Government ROI

    · 32 min · Bonus · Explicit

    Economist Kathryn Edwards is back with more answers. In Part 2, she talks more about student loans, who actually “lives off taxpayers,” why gold reserves aren’t a great idea anymore, the importance of mobility in…

  49. Q&A Part 1: Tax Philosophy, Liberal vs. Conservative Economists, Marriage vs. Poverty and More

    · 43 min · S1 E20 · Explicit

    In the first of two mailbag episodes, economist Kathryn Edwards answers questions from optimist listeners on taxation on wages vs. investments, whether student loans are regressive, how bona fide economists wind up on…

  50. A Million Reasons to Raise the Minimum Wage

    · 58 min · S1 E19

    The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour hasn’t been raised since the era of flip phones. Competing bills introduced in Congress recently would set it at $15 or $17. Is that high enough, and how can we ensure it…

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