Claudia Goldin

Um, back in 2019, he wrote a whole, um, essay in the Atlantic describing it as this new American religion with people working far more than was necessary to keep the lights on or even to have a sort of affluent lifestyle, but really going above and beyond.

And I think that one of the roots of that is the sort of way that labor and the rewards of work have shifted where the economist Claudia Golden talks about this idea of greedy jobs.

So it's not these are jobs where if you work an extra 10 hours, you don't just get 10x your hourly wage, you might get you know, if you work 20 extra hours a week, you might wind up with a bonus in, you know, the mid six figures or even more as we think of jobs like consulting, corporate law, finance, tech.

So the rewards are really disproportionate, even to the amount of time that you put in.

If I'm trying to think of, like, who are the big giants in each field, I would think the first one, you know, this digitization is, like, Eric Brynjolfsson and, like, Coe.

The second one's, like, you know, David Autor, Claudia Goldin, you mentioned.

And then, like, the third, I would think, like, Romer, Chad Jones style.

Like, you know, so that's kind of, like, growthy, growth people, you

Some experts point to smartphones and social media, others to the cost of childcare, still others to existential dread or over-parenting.

Claudia Golden, the Nobel Prize-winning labor economist, favors another explanation.

It's the men.

In a widely discussed new working paper, she argues that husbands still fail to do their fair share of housework and childcare, forcing their wives to choose between procreation and career success.

And so women saw expanded educational opportunities in part due to policies such as Title IX, which said that funding for higher education had to be proportional for men and women.

And also other societal trends such as delayed marriage, which may have been brought about by the birth control pill, for instance, that the famous work by Larry Katz and Claudia Golden point out.

Delaying marriage enabled women to stay in school for longer.

And so both Title IX and the birth control pill may have helped women achieve a better human capital through staying in schools.

We had Claudia Golden on and kind of fact chats and she described the way in which in one of her books she used the depiction of women in television as sort of an indicator of changing societal norms.

It went from the housewife in Father Knows Best to the secretary in Perry Mason to the single woman who had a job in Mary Tyler Moore, Mary Tyler Moore Show.

to Tina Fey, who was actually a boss in 30 Rock.

In politics, women hold less than a third of elected offices.

Because even if you get promoted a year faster, the raise that comes with that promotion is so much bigger.

So this is Claudia Goldin's work, who won the Nobel Prize two years ago.

Um, but she shows analytically that if you can get promoted even just a little bit earlier each step of the way, at the end of the day you have significantly more than if you had just negotiated a raise every year.

Wow, that's so...

To mark the occasion, we reached out to a couple of past laureates to hear how things have been going since getting the call.

First, Claudia Goldin, an economics professor at Harvard University.

She won in twenty twenty-three for her work in the field of historical economics, tracking women's pay and labor market participation across centuries.

This award, to me, was not just to me, it was to an extremely large group of people.

It's basically a universal experience.

And in 2023, Nobel Prize winning author, she was an economist and an author, Claudia Golden, defined greedy work as jobs demanding constant availability and punishing anyone who has caregiving responsibilities.

She said the final act in Gender Gap Saga can't be written until couples share more and the world of work makes that less of a costly thing to do.

There is a reality to taking five years off to raise a family.

And-

And many women in those, like, more structured professions say, like, "No, I don't want flexibility, I want boundaries." 'Cause what flexibility often means is that you always take your work home with you and you end up very burned out, right? And so I think that's gonna be the new task for these, like, what Claudia Goldin calls greedy jobs, the jobs that are just asking more and more of employees, is how do you still provide your employees with some kind of boundaries so that they can still feel like they get to be people outside of work? And so, you know, wh- uh, when I'm talking to, like, a law firm and they say, like, "Well, I don't know if that's ever gonna be the case because, like, you know, our cl- our clients have issues when our clients have issues," it's like, okay, but can you assign one of the associates on the team to be on call for the first weekend in the month, and a different associate to be on call for the second weekend-

Mm-hmm

... of the month and et cetera, so that then they still have their weekends where they know, "Okay, I get to be a whole person.