Betsey Stevenson
Betsey Stevenson is a labor economist at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy. She served as a member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2015 and as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor from 2010 to 2011, and in 2023 joined the Board of Directors of Lyft. With Justin Wolfers, she is co-author of the Principles of Economics textbook and co-host of the Think Like An Economist podcast.
Other places you can find me
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Popular Writing · The New York Times
3 Experts on What Trump Is Doing to the Economy
A New York Times guest essay roundtable with Josh Barro and Greg Mankiw on the economic consequences of the Trump administration's tariff, immigration, and fiscal policy decisions.
August 21, 2025
Research · AI & the Economy
What Is There to Fear in a Post-AGI World?
A chapter for the NBER volume on the economics of transformative AI. Stevenson argues the real fears in a post-AGI world aren't about output — it's that the material gains arrive in a pattern that leaves many behind, and that even when incomes rise, the institutions and norms that grant people purpose, status, and community fail to keep pace. Drawing on the evidence that happiness rises with log income (but meaning does not), on the Engels pause, and on the twentieth-century household revolution that reordered women's and men's roles, she argues technologies only translate productivity into lived flourishing when societies retool distribution and redesign meaning.
In Ajay Agrawal, Erik Brynjolfsson, and Anton Korinek (eds.), The Economics of Transformative AI, University of Chicago Press / NBER, 2025 · 2025
Textbook · 3rd edition
Principles of Economics
An introductory economics textbook by Stevenson and Wolfers, built around a short list of core ideas — cost-benefit thinking, opportunity cost, marginal decisions, interdependence — and applied to the economy students live in. Published in full-year and split Micro / Macro editions, with regional adaptations for Australia / New Zealand and Canada, international editions from Macmillan UK, and translations in Italian and Korean.