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• Economics in the Hot Seat

Transcript

Tim Sablik: My guests today are Yaa Opoku-Agyeman, an economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and Rachel Lee, an applied scientist at Uber Eats who works on real-time pricing. Thank you both for joining me today.

Yaa Opoku-Agyeman: Thank you for having us.

Rachel Lee: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Sablik: On the show, I often talk to our research economists about policies and macroeconomic trends that can seem a little removed from most people's daily lives. So today, we're going to try to bring things back down to earth and talk a little bit about how economics is used in different real-world contexts.

You both recently participated in an event hosted by the Richmond and St. Louis Feds called "Economics in the Hot Seat." We'll put a link up to the video of that event for any listeners who are interested in checking that out. I'm excited to continue the conversation today here on the podcast. I'll ask you both some questions about your career paths and how you use economics in your daily jobs.

To kick things off, Yaa, how did you first get interested in economics?

Opoku-Agyeman: Before I start, these opinions stated are my own and not that of the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Department of Labor. These are purely Yaa Opuku-Agyeman's answers.

I got interested in economics, like most students do, in terms of taking an Econ 101 course. If you succeed, you stick with it. If you don't, you leave it behind.

Sablik: Rachel?

Lee: I have a similar story to Yaa's. When I was in high school, I didn't think that I would ever use econ, so I opted to take that class — out of all of my high school classes — online. And then, ironically, in my first year of undergrad, I was a business student and took Business Econ 101. I really connected with it and was drawn to it, eventually switched over to be an econ major, and just kept going with that.

Sablik: Can you each describe what you do in your job and how you use economics in your typical day?

Opoku-Agyeman: Because I work in the Bureau of Labor Statistics under the Department of Labor, it's a lot of labor economics. So, unemployment rate, inflation rate, wage statistics, that's usually the type of data I'm working with.

A typical day usually includes data analysis, writing press releases, and interacting with data users as well as the public. I might give a presentation one day, and then the next day I might be fielding a couple of calls with data users navigating our website or pulling data that best suits them.

Lee: I am on the surge pricing team for Uber Eats. Basically, the entire premise of our main product is rooted in economics and the laws of supply and demand. Every week, we evaluate data from all of the markets that we serve globally to determine whether our algorithms are working as intended to balance out the marketplace, to balance out supply and demand, or if we need to adjust or improve the model in some way. Also, in my day-to-day, I'll be designing and running experiments to test whatever products we're developing. That's also very related to a lot of applied econ work.

Sablik: As I mentioned in my introduction, I think economists are sometimes portrayed as maybe a bit out of touch with the public, working on research and writing on topics in their ivory towers. I'm curious how your work interacts with issues that are a bit more connected to everyday people.

Opoku-Agyeman: Most people are in the labor force market here in the U.S., so my [work] is pretty hands on in terms of interacting with people day to day [on the] type of issues that matter to them, so inflation in terms of the inflation trend — not only nationally but regionally and then even down to the metro level. We don't offer solutions, we offer facts.

Lee: To piggyback off of that, a lot of economics are not out of touch at all. I think it's very common for many people, including people in my own family, to think that economics is only about interest rates and the stock market. In reality that's such a small sector of a vast range of topics that economists study. I think a lot of research topics are incredibly important in the real world.

I guess I'm a little bit biased because I am more of an applied person, but a lot of applied economists use real-world data to understand causal links between things and try to learn from what's happening in the world so that we can improve in some way. Topics such as labor economics and development economics are super important for all of us, really.

Last year, Claudia Goldin won the Nobel Prize in Economics studying the gender wage gap and inequality in the labor market for women. She was just looking at how this has evolved over time. I think that's super important.

Opuku-Agyeman: Yeah, it's true. A lot of the research that economists do look at, it's mainly from interactions that we have every day. So yes, sometimes the papers can be dense, but it's not necessarily out of touch. With the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you can get data for contract negotiations and pay raises.

Lee: A lot of what applied economists do and econometricians [do] is try to find ways to use natural experiments to learn about causal links. A couple of years ago, David Card won the Nobel Prize alongside [Joshua] Angrist and [Guido] Imbens and they use natural experiments to look at immigration and the minimum wage and education and how those things impact the labor market.

Sablik: Yeah, I think those are all great points. I may have been strawmaning a little bit with that question.

Lee: I think you're totally right. A lot of people are like, "Oh, economists, what do they even do?"

Opoku-Agyeman: Exactly.

Lee: We do so much.

Sablik: Hopefully, this conversation will help in that regard, help people to realize the connections.

Could you each give an example of a particularly interesting real-world problem that you've worked on?

Opoku-Agyeman: Here in our office, we've been assisting other government entities with understanding our data to assist in publically funded services. Some of our programs are in partnership with the Census, so we end up fielding calls about how to best use the data that they have or that they collect and that we put out, or vice versa. It's just interesting seeing the type of issues that they end up dealing with.

I can't go into too much detail because of government, but the real-world problem is public funding.

Lee: Something that I worked on when I first joined [Uber Eats], which was pretty exciting and interesting to me, was I helped identify times and places that were undersupplied, basically didn't have enough couriers for the amount of demand. This was particularly relevant during COVID because everyone was at home, people didn't quite know what was going on.

One thing we did to try and help improve the health of the marketplace and meet that demand was, whenever an area was surging and couriers could get paid a bit more, we would try to encourage offline couriers to come online by basically thinking about "where do you typically work as a courier?" If that area is surging, we'll let them know like, hey there's opportunities right now to make a bit of extra money if you want to come online and make some more deliveries. That was something that was really cool.

Sablik: What do each of you like most about what you do?

Opoku-Agyeman: For me, I like how I'm able to interact with a little bit of everything. Here at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we have a couple of programs such as the import and export program that I'm really interested in, given that my degree was in international relations, seeing how the trade numbers come in with import and export prices. But then I can also work with wage data. I wanted a position that allowed me to interact with different areas rather than settling on one specialization.

Lee: One thing that's pretty different about working at a place like Uber versus being a PhD student or in academia is that we're able to design and run experiments to learn about whatever particular thing we're trying to learn about. Of course, this is also done in academia. But I think it's a bit easier to do it from the standpoint of a market that we totally control and can make little tweaks to or introduce new products to. So, I think that's something that's been really fun.

Sablik: I was gonna say that's an economist's dream to run your own experiments.

Lee: Exactly. It's quite rewarding once you launch it, especially If you get some promising results and can launch a product or something out of it. It's really exciting.

Sablik: Returning a bit to the previous conversation about applied economics and the ways it interacts with daily life, do you have any advice for students who are thinking about studying economics and, in particular, advice for students who are interested in economics but might not want to go down the PhD path?

Opoku-Agyeman: My advice for students thinking about studying economics is find how economics complements what you're interested in. It's the study of markets that involve resources and the production of goods and services at the fundamental level.

When I was told that I should have a backup plan because in international relations not everyone's going to become a diplomat, econ and politics worked very well together. That led me down the trade route, and that led me down to sustainable development. Find what you're interested in and then see how it's related to econ and then work from there.

For those that don't necessarily want to go down like the PhD route — I didn't — you have to know yourself really well before you commit to those years of schooling and, again, with your lens focused on interests that can help you better understand some areas of how the economy works, something that you know you're willing to study for long periods of time and you're not going to drop it in the middle.

Lee: My answer is really similar to Yaa's. I would say my advice for students, not just those in econ but generally, is to really think about what you're interested in doing beyond school and find subjects that will teach you the skill sets or prime you to do that job or career or help you move towards those goals. At the end of the day, school is really just an investment in yourself.

Sablik: Yaa and Rachel, thank you both for coming on to talk about your careers and economics journeys.

Opoku-Agyeman: Thank you for having us.

Lee: Thanks for having us. This was a blast.