Work and Moral Economics: Two Podcasts (Dart Lindsley's "Work for Humans" and Ben Zweig's "The Economics of Work).

Two podcasts interview me about Moral Economics, starting from a concern with work. 

 Dart Lindsley interviews me on his Podcast "Work for Humans":

Moral Economics: Where Human Values Shape Markets | Alvin Roth
Work For Humans 

Here it is on every platform.  

 

"A kidney transplant does not work like buying a gallon of milk. Neither does hiring or getting into a medical residency. In these markets, both sides care deeply about who they end up with, and a good outcome depends on more than money. 

Alvin Roth has spent his career studying what makes those systems succeed or fail. His work designing kidney exchange programs showed that even when people desperately want to help each other, the market can still break down unless the rules create the right kind of match. In this episode, Dart and Al discuss matching markets, moral economics, and the hidden rules that shape opportunity, fairness, and work itself.

Alvin Roth is an economist and professor at Stanford University best known for his work on market design and matching theory. He received the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on stable matching and the design of markets used in medical residencies, school choice, and kidney exchange.

In this episode, Dart and Al discuss:
- Why some markets depend on matching
- Why fit matters more than money
- What makes a market stable
- Why real markets are messy
- The difference between theory and engineering
- What “repugnant transactions” are
- Why societies ban some exchanges
- How social norms shape markets
- Why work is also a matching problem
- And other topics…

Alvin Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and recipient of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, awarded with Lloyd Shapley for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. His work has helped design matching systems for medical residencies, public school admissions, and kidney exchange programs. He is the author of Who Gets What — and Why and Moral Economics: Why Good and Bad Markets Exist.

Resources Mentioned:
Al’s Book, Moral Economics: From Prostitution to Organ Sales, What Controversial Transactions Reveal About How Markets Work

Al’s Book, Who Gets What — and Why

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And here's Ben Zweig's The Economics of Work:

  "It was so fun talking to Alvin Roth, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics. "One of my favorite books of all time is Who Gets What and Why, which has shaped the way I view labor markets. His second book, Moral Economics, came out last week and it’s so so good - endlessly thought provoking, funny, and sharp. In the podcast, we talk about controversial markets and what makes something repugnant, how to think about exploitation and coercion, and what that means for labor markets. "Check out the latest episode of The Economics of Work and Al's new book Moral Economics! "Moral Economics from Basic Books: Amazon: https://a.co/d/0cu6ZCLm Podcast Episode: Apple: https://lnkd.in/esVGQQx5 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/e4sr844Q Youtube: https://lnkd.in/eif7DHMS" 

Peter Rousseau comments on our field experiment involving the Econ job market, in PNAS

 My post yesterday was about the experiment about social media and the job market for economists.  I only noticed later that the PNAS also posted a comment on our article, by Professor Peter Rousseau, the secretary of the American Economic Association, who has a long and intimate familiarity with that job market, which the AEA has played a giant role in organizing.

 Improving the job market in economics (and beyond…) by Peter L. Rousseau  PNAS   May 4, 2026  https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2609971123

Here is the part of his comment directly connected to our paper:

" the authors make a welcome and useful contribution to the market design literature with a fascinating experiment designed to substitute for and even improve upon the informal information channels lost to the economics job market in the new postpandemic normal. Given that some job candidates are less active self-promoters than others and that, conversely, excessive self-promotion can in some cases be viewed as a negative by prospective recruiters, the authors’ proposed mechanism offers serious promise for leveling the playing field, even if just modestly, for economics job candidates in terms of their visibilities, and perhaps even for expanding the number of jobs actually filled over the course of a recruiting season.
 

"In the experiment, an AI-based algorithm, supplemented with some human checking and reassignments, matched selected economists on social media (i.e., the “influencers”) with willing job candidates based on the closeness of their research. About 43 percent of willing candidates were selected for this treatment. The key to the experiment lies in the matches themselves, which were assigned in a manner that did not take the relative prominence or institutional ranking of an influencer directly into account. All candidate participants were invited to post a tweet about their job market papers on a social media site created for this purpose, and the influencers were asked to post neutral quote-tweets about the members of the treatment group to which they had been assigned. If executed according to design, recruiters viewing the quote-tweets receive information about the closeness of a given candidate’s research interests to those of the influencer. This may function as a partial substitute for the painstaking process of deducing such information across the hundreds of application packets that recruiters receive with only a brief period for making initial decisions. Knowing that a candidate’s research is close to that of Professor “X” is a tangible signal that could make that candidate more likely to be interviewed or receive a campus flyout or job offer from an institution seeking an entry-level economist like Professor X. The experiment indicates that individuals in the treatment group did indeed receive more campus visits and job offers than candidates assigned to the control group, and that the effect on job offers was especially strong for women. It also finds, however, that these effects were more pronounced for candidates matched to influencers with relatively higher citation counts than for those matched to influencers with relatively more followers, as these two measures of prominence in the profession are not that highly correlated. 

" The question of scalability then becomes paramount. Considering the experiment’s positive findings, it is natural to assume that, if universally available, all job candidates would choose to participate and receive the treatment. The process would otherwise go on as stated with perhaps additional influencers being selected by the organizers to serve the larger pool of candidates. Two observations seem reasonable at this point: first, in such a setup, better information about matches could lead to more open positions being filled, which would be a better aggregate outcome; and second, the treatment might in practice benefit candidates from outside the very top departments the most. This is because candidates from the highest ranked departments, who are often perceived by recruiters as having a higher probability of eventually becoming a star, will typically receive more interviews, campus visits, and offers, but in the end can still only accept one offer. With an enlarged set of viable matches, this means that some candidates who may have been otherwise overlooked will find jobs. Of course, the job market may take longer to clear under this mechanism as candidates will have more options to consider before departments go to second or third rounds of offers.
 

"Casual observations of the job market among economics departments and their chairs do suggest that a number of recruiters are unable to fill positions they have posted. The AEA does not currently collect information on just how many, but the very existence of the “AEA Job Market Scramble,” where recruiters and unmatched candidates can post their availabilities on an online message board each March, is indicative of the challenge (3). The design of a job signaling mechanism by the AEA and its implementation in December of each year (4), where job candidates can list two departments to which they would like to express interest in an interview, is another such intervention aimed at easing the congestion.
Another interesting result is that women appear to benefit most from the treatment, while this benefit does not extend to members of other groups traditionally underrepresented in economics. The authors point to existing evidence indicating that women on average tend to be less active promoters of their own research on social media than others and suggest that the additional visibility provided by the quote-tweets could be leading to more job offers. This potential channel, of course, could also be viable for any candidate with a tendency to self-promote less. To explain a special advantage for women, one could note the possibility of forces in the 2022–2023 job market where departments seeking to improve the gender balances of their faculties became aware of candidates through the mechanism who they may have otherwise overlooked. If this is the case, the next question to ask is why does the effect not carry over for members of other underrepresented groups? The answer, though no doubt a speculative one, may lie in the preexistence of other mechanisms and informal channels for promoting such candidates, rendering the marginal effects of the authors’ particular intervention not statistically significant.
Finally, while having the potential to increase the number of matches and raise their average quality, the effects of the authors’ intervention will be subject to some randomness based on the assignment of a given candidate’s influencer. For example, when any influencer posts a quote-tweet about a candidate who has been independently and objectively determined to have close research interests, that candidate’s post tends to receive more views and likes on X than those in the control group, and the extent of this visibility correlates with the size of the influencer’s following. Yet these effects do not seem to transfer downstream to job outcomes, where candidates receiving quote-tweets from highly cited influencers are the ones tending to see more offers. In a real sense, the adage “all publicity is good publicity,” often applied to economics research, may not be always true. The assignment of influencers to candidates, even if randomized, will matter for individual outcomes even though the aggregate effects of the intervention are positive. Given the potential individual benefits compared to nontreatment, however, job candidates would likely embrace the residual uncertainty and participate in the mechanism.
 

"The intervention designed by Qiu et al. may hold even greater promise outside of the economics discipline. In the natural sciences, for example, recruiting for scarce academic postdoctoral positions among new PhDs at a similar career stage, which are markets typically saturated with candidates, often moves directly to a very limited allocation of campus visits based in no small part on letters and other communications from mentors, some of whom could be less than ideally matched with their students or less well known than would-be assigned influencers. These cases are ones in which an enhanced visibility of candidates, when coupled with independent information about the closeness of their work to what senior researchers and their groups might be seeking, could lead to the greater advancement of science more generally.
 : 
"Competing interests P.L.R. has served since 2012 as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Economic Association, a 501(c)(3) non-profit deeply committed to improving the job market for new Ph.D. economists, and for which one of the companion article’s co-authors (A. E. Roth) served as President in 2017.

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 Peter's comment and our paper appeared online, but won't appear in print until next week in the May 12, 2026 | vol. 123 | no. 19 issue of PNAS.

 

Yesterday's post: 

Tuesday, May 5, 2026  Social media, job market outcomes, and ethics of field experiments, by Qiu, Chen, Cohn and Roth in PNAS

 

Social media, job market outcomes, and ethics of field experiments, by Qiu, Chen, Cohn and Roth in PNAS

 One of the fun things about our paper published in today's PNAS is that, as a working paper, it prompted a vigorous discussion of the ethics of doing field experiments in economics.  We discuss this more fully in the published version, below:

J. Qiu, Y. Chen, A. Cohn, & A.E. Roth, Social media promotion improves job market outcomes, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (19) e2528289123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2528289123 (2026). 

Abstract: Social media has transformed how academics disseminate research, but its effect on academic job outcomes remains unclear. Previous research has shown correlations between social media exposure and metrics like citation counts, but these relationships may be confounded by unobserved factors such as researcher quality or access to professional networks. We examine whether social media promotion causally affects job market outcomes in economics through a field experiment on Twitter (now X). We first collect tweets about job market papers from 519 candidates and post them from a dedicated account. We then randomize half of the posts to be quote-tweeted by established economists in the candidates’ fields, and measure the effects on both online visibility and hiring outcomes. We find that posts in the treatment group receive 441% more views and 303% more likes than those in the control group. Candidates whose posts were assigned to be quote-tweeted receive one additional flyout invitation compared to the control group average of 5.4 flyouts. Furthermore, women in the treatment group receive 0.9 more job offers than women in the control group, who receive 3 offers on average. Exploring mechanisms, we find that academic reputation drives these results, with stronger effects for quote-tweets from highly cited scholars and for candidates from top institutions. Our findings suggest social media promotion causally increases research visibility and improves academic job market outcomes.

 

  ...

"Ethical considerations.
"After the release of our working paper on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) on May 20, 2024, a vigorous discussion arose on both social and mainstream media, particularly on Twitter, about the ethics of our experiment and of field experiments more generally (e.g., ref. 30). The main concern suggested that job markets are essentially constant sum, so that randomly promoting some candidates through having their JMPs quote-tweeted by influencers would necessarily (and unethically) disadvantage both those who were in the control condition of the experiment and those who did not participate in the experiment.
 

"We understand the importance of considering the ethical implications of any experiment and that ethicality is connected to the underlying economics of the job market. In this latter respect, given the information friction and congestion in the interview process, job markets are unlikely to be constant sum. Aside from the possibility of welfare gains from improved match quality, we note that, typically in matching markets, many employers fail to fill all their positions while at the same time qualified candidates fail to find one, so that welfare can also be improved by filling more positions. [In the 2022–2023 job market, the total number of jobs listed on JOE was 3,608, including 933 (1,083) full-time academic jobs in (outside) the United States and 718 full-time nonacademic jobs (any location). On the supply side, 1,386 Ph.D. students and postdocs applied to at least one job through JOE from August to December 2022 (31).] In economics, the job market often has unfilled positions by the end of February, leading to a scramble round each year starting in March. Similarly, the annual National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) for new physicians in the United States also leads to some positions being unfilled, despite having far more applicants than available positions. [For example, in 2024, 38,494 positions were offered to 44,853 active applicants and 2,510 positions were unfilled (6.5%), at the end of both the main match (a deferred acceptance algorithm, see ref. 32) and a centralized postmatch scramble called the Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (33).]
 

"The phenomenon of unfilled positions in a thick labor market may reflect congestion in the interview process. In such a market, since many positions receive more applications than the number of candidates who can feasibly be interviewed, the matching of interviews to jobs may be imperfect in the sense that an employer can find that none of the people interviewed can be successfully hired, but could have filled the position if more appropriate interviewees had been chosen. To mitigate this issue, signaling mechanisms have been introduced in both the economics and medical markets to facilitate a better matching of interviewees and employers (29, 34). In our context, the quote-tweeting of JMPs may similarly serve to help employers find better matches with their selection of interviewees who can be hired.
 

"We also propose that highlighting suitable candidates from underrepresented groups for a position could potentially expand the overall number of job openings. A notable example is the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, implemented across multiple institutions including the University of Michigan and the University of California system. This program seeks to recruit future faculty members “with the potential to bring to their research and undergraduate teaching the critical perspective that comes from their nontraditional educational background or understanding of the experiences of groups historically underrepresented in higher education.” (See, e.g., https://presidentspostdoc.umich.edu/, retrieved on August 29, 2025.)
 

"Finally, we consider trends in the broader context of job search in evaluating the ethical considerations related to our study. Social media has become a common channel for academics to advertise the JMPs of their students. Thus, we are not introducing a new channel for candidate promotion, nor are we excluding others outside of our experiment from availing themselves of this channel. Our goal is to understand the extent to which this channel may create visibility or improve outcomes for job candidates, especially since not all candidates may have equal access. Our paper belongs to the class of natural field experiment (35), a class that has seen a growing number of studies in which field experiments are used to assess the effects of market interventions. [A natural field experiment is one “where the subjects do not know that they are in an experiment” (35). In our context, participants were told only that we would arrange for their JMPs to be tweeted, but not that there would be a quote-tweet treatment.] One of the main benefits of conducting a natural field experiment is that it minimizes possible Hawthorne effects (36). These studies are widely accepted and even recognized, with the 2019 Nobel Prize for experiments in development economics. If it is ethical for economists to use experiments to evaluate interventions in other markets, it should also be ethical for economists to study the market for economists. And if it is ethical to promote students who are on the job market, then it should be ethical to study the effects of such promotion.
 

"In sum, from a normative perspective (should scholars promote candidates?), we argue that such promotion can reduce information friction and job market congestion, potentially leading to more efficient matching. From a positive perspective (does promotion matter?), we demonstrate in Results that it increases candidate visibility and improves job market outcomes, especially for women who are traditionally underrepresented in economics." 

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Earlier (a blog post about reference 30, above): 

Saturday, June 8, 2024  The ethics of field experiments in Economics, in the Financial Times

 

Exodus from NIH

 MedpageToday has the story:

The People — and Research — Lost in the NIH Exodus  by Rachana Pradhan and Katheryn Houghton, KFF Health News 

"Chou specializes in communication between patients and their healthcare providers, and social media's role in public health. She joined the federal government in 2007 as a fellow and became a civil servant in 2010.

She left her National Cancer Institute job in January, she said, because the "work is no longer based on facts or truth."

...

"Romberg is a scientist who specializes in preventing the use of and addiction to tobacco, electronic cigarettes, and cannabis. The harms that stem from substance use or addiction don't affect all Americans equally, she said.

Romberg left her "dream job" at the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) in December, she said, because Trump policies had compromised the research she helped oversee. Among other things, Romberg said, grants were terminated under an initiative she led to reduce health disparities among racial and ethnic minorities related to substance use.  

...

"The loss of staff means the NIH has "lost so much of that institutional knowledge and leadership, which is not something that is easy or can be learned overnight," 

How will the Army build AI and robotics expertise in uniform?

 The US armed services have an unusual labor market.  Most soldiers, sailers, airmen and now space forcers join the military pretty much right out of high school, either directly, or in college ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps), or in one of the military academies.  Two exceptions are lawyers and doctors, who can join as officers without prior military experience (i.e. they can become officers without ever having learned how to salute).

Now that computer science of various sorts is entering warfare, cyber warriors are also needed.  But there's only so much you can do with contractors and consultants.  

This month, the Army is introducing a new career path for officers:

Army establishes new AI, machine learning career path for officers 

"The U.S. Army has established a new career pathway for officers to specialize in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), formally designating the 49B AI/ML Officer as an official area of concentration. It advances the Army's ongoing transformation into a data-centric and AI-enabled force.

Full implementation of the new career field will be phased. The first selection of officers will occur through the Army's Volunteer Transfer Incentive Program (VTIP) beginning January 2026. The officers will be reclassified by the end of fiscal year 2026."

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And here's another report that indicates that some CS experts have also been laterally recruited into the officer corps.

 Army creates AI career field, pathway for officers to join

"In June, the Army directly commissioned several tech executives with artificial intelligence backgrounds from companies such as Meta and Palantir as lieutenant colonels as part of its Executive Innovation Corps (EIC). Those executives serve in the reserves as “senior advisors,” the Army said. 

The job market for economists, 2026

 The WSJ has the story:

Economists Are Studying the Slowing Job Market—and Feeling It Themselves
Newly minted Ph.D.s tend to work for universities, government agencies and big white-collar companies. It’s not a great hiring time for any of them.  By  Justin Lahart 

"The economics job market is getting buffeted by a confluence of forces. Worries about federal funding have led many major universities to reduce, or even freeze, hiring. Jobs within the federal government have dried up. The private sector, where demand for economists has been intense in recent years, has pulled back. 

“It’s like a perfect storm,” said Syracuse University economist John Cawley, who heads the American Economic Association’s job market committee.

"The tough market for doctoral students finishing up their studies is hardly unique to economics. What’s different about economists is that they are intensely interested in measuring and understanding how labor markets work—and they have brought that to bear on their own profession. As a result, armed with data from the AEA and all the knowledge they gained in graduate school, doctoral students in economics have a much more precise grasp of what type of environment they are facing than their counterparts in political science, philosophy or biophysics.

...

"The economics job market has its own peculiar rhythms and hierarchies. In the fall, students who are finishing their Ph.D.s, as well as economists in postdoctoral programs, apply for jobs that typically start the following summer. But because students can apply to dozens, or even hundreds, of jobs, this creates a matching problem: How does a prospective employer know which candidates are serious?

"Economists, being economists, have tried to solve this. When a candidate applies for jobs via JOE, they are able to send up to two “signals” of interest for jobs they are particularly interested in—almost like a winking emoji on a dating app. That signaling system was put together with the help of Stanford economist Alvin Roth, who also developed systems for matching kidney donors with patients and New York City schoolchildren with schools." 

Medicare funding of medical residencies

 I'm always puzzled by the fact that much of the discussion of the wages of medical residents ignores that many residency positions are paid at rates established by Medicare, which also has a big influence on the number of residency positions.

MedpageToday has the story: 

CMS Funds 400 New Residency Slots — Most new Medicare-funded positions will go to primary care, psychiatry programs by Joedy McCreary 

"The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) last week allocated the 400 Medicare-funded residency slots to 135 hospitals in 37 states. Nearly two-thirds of the positions will support primary care and psychiatry residency programs.

...

"The announcement "marks a critical milestone in enabling academic health systems and teaching hospitals to continue providing top-quality patient care," said Jonathan Jaffery, MD, the AAMC's chief healthcare officer. "Academic health systems are already incurring a significant financial burden by choosing to train a portion of their medical residents without federal support. This new round of residency positions will allow them to continue investing in physician training to the benefit of patients nationwide." 

...

"Under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, Congress authorized 1,000 new residency positions to be distributed over 5 years. The 200 positions announced this month represent the fourth allocation from that total. An additional 200 slots were authorized under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023, with at least 100 positions required to support psychiatry or psychiatry subspecialty residency training programs.

"The Balanced Budget Act of 1997 capped the number of Medicare-supported residency positions at each teaching hospital. Lifting that cap, the AAMC's 2024 report concluded, would help alleviate -- though not fully eliminate -- current and projected physician shortages. "

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On a lighter note, here's  their headline about Xmas-time emergency medicine:

Deck the Halls With Ow's From Folly: What the Numbers Tell Us About Holiday Injuries