Kathryn Anne Edwards

So you need to triage your unemployment system so that it looks like unemployment.

Some people who lose their job to AI, they'll probably get a new job within one to two months.

Some people, it'll take six, they'll pivot a little bit, but they'll be fine.

Other people, they'll never find a job in the career they were trained for again.

Our unemployment system basically is hands over the eyes, hands over the ears, shaking its head, not recognizing that any of that nuance occurs.

It absolutely could.

Just triage through them.

There's also a lot of ways we could deliver benefits that would be smarter and more fitting to how people respond to unemployment.

So an idea that's been kicking around for such a long time but no one wants to take initiative on is it should be paid out as a lump sum.

Right now, it's a weekly benefit.

You're eligible for a period of time, sometimes up to 26 weeks, longer in a recession.

But 26 weeks of a fourth of your pay is really tough if you've got a mortgage, if you've got rent, if you've got a car payment.

If you know a friend who has a job or says there's space in another city and you think you'll be able to get a job there, the weekly benefit is so paltry.

It's enough to not lose everything, but it's also so little you'll lose something.

A lot of people think that you should be able to just get your four weeks or eight weeks of unemployment paid out as a check.

And then if you need to move, if you need to pay for something, you know, you just you empower more workers.

I think the part that's scary for a lot of policymakers is that we're not a country that easily gives power to workers.

And this would empower them greatly.

My response is policy person first, economist second, human third.

So policy person first, they're both failures.