621. Is Professional Licensing a Racket?
· 55 min · Episode 621
Episode 621. Is Professional Licensing a Racket?
Licensing began with medicine and law; now it extends to 20 percent of the U.S. workforce, including hair stylists and auctioneers. In a new book, the legal scholar Rebecca Allensworth calls licensing boards “a thicket of self-dealing and ineptitude” and says they keep bad workers in their jobs and good ones out — while failing to protect the public.
• SOURCES:
• Rebecca Allensworth, professor of law at Vanderbilt University.
• RESOURCES:
• "The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work, and Why It Goes Wrong" by Rebecca Allensworth (2025). • "Licensed to Pill," by Rebecca Allensworth (The New York Review of Books, 2020). • "Licensing Occupations: Ensuring Quality or Restricting Competition?" by Morris Kleiner (W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 2006). • "How Much of Barrier to Entry is Occupational Licensing?" by Peter Blair and Bobby Chung (British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2019).
• EXTRAS:
• "Is Ozempic as Magical as It Sounds?" by Freakonomics Radio (2024).
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Links in the notes 7
- https://law.vanderbilt.edu/bio/?pid=rebecca-allensworth
- https://amzn.to/4hDxlMm
- https://www.nybooks.com/online/2020/07/21/licensed-to-pill/
- https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/18/
- https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjir.12470
- https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-ozempic-as-magical-as-it-sounds/
- https://pcm.adswizz.com
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