Daryl Fairweather

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money.

Oh wow, that's good.

So I think a good metaphor for the housing market is musical chairs.

Like the people who already own houses are sitting in their chairs.

And whenever there's a new spring housing market, some people get up and they move and they select a new chair.

And if you're not adding more chairs in, you can't get first time homebuyers into the market so easily.

Yes.

They hired me specifically to be behavioral economist because they didn't want people at the part of the company that I was working at to get too nervous that they were hiring some economist in who was going to cut roles or make things harder for people.

So they wanted people to know that I had a softer touch.

And my training is in behavioral economist and

I think that is a signal to people that I think about things a bit more holistically than maybe the typical economist.

Well, this was when they were getting a lot of bad press for the way that they were treating their employees.

There was this big New York Times expose about it.

I think it was before that.

There are a couple of exposés.

So my job was to work on employee engagement, especially for our more frontline call center employees, and to figure out how to keep them from quitting, how to keep them happy, how to give them career opportunities.

And we actually had data to measure according to that.

So that was my role as a behavioral economist.