What are the key takeaways from this Marketplace episode?

Key insights include: **AI Job Transformation Timeline:** Prompt engineering jobs failed to materialize as companies trained existing employees instead. MIT research shows jobs are changing subtly rather than creating new categories within three years of ChatGPT launch, similar to historical office technology transitions.; **Consumer Confidence Divergence:** October Conference Board index reveals stark income divide—confidence rose for households earning over $200,000 annually while falling for those under $75,000. The jobs availability metric predicts unemployment will remain stable despite overall ambivalent sentiment.; **School Meal Debt Crisis:** Unpaid meal balances doubled from $3,400 median in 2018 to $6,900 in 2024 after pandemic-era universal free meals ended. Families earning just above $59,478 for four people face $1,000-$2,000 annual costs, forcing schools to cover shortfalls from academic budgets.

What did Larry Schmidt and David Deming discuss on Marketplace?

Amazon announces 30,000 white-collar layoffs driven by AI automation, while economists find no evidence of new job categories emerging yet. Consumer confidence remains stagnant amid inflation concerns and tariff uncertainty. Key topics include: **AI Job Transformation Timeline:** Prompt engineering jobs failed to materialize as companies trained existing employees instead. MIT research shows jobs are changing subtly rather than creating new categories within three years of ChatGPT launch, similar to historical office technology transitions.; **Consumer Confidence Divergence:** October Conference Board index reveals stark income divide—confidence rose for households earning over $200,000 annually while falling for those under $75,000. The jobs availability metric predicts unemployment will remain stable despite overall ambivalent sentiment..

How long is this episode of Marketplace?

This episode is 25 minutes long. SignalCast provides an AI-generated summary so you can get the key insights in about 3 minutes.

Marketplace

AI is here. Where are the new, better jobs?

October 28, 2025

25 min episode · 2 min read

Larry Schmidt,David Deming,David Martin

Episode

25 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Sales & Revenue, Artificial Intelligence

AI-Generated Summary

Published Dec 25, 2025

Key Takeaways

✓AI Job Transformation Timeline: Prompt engineering jobs failed to materialize as companies trained existing employees instead. MIT research shows jobs are changing subtly rather than creating new categories within three years of ChatGPT launch, similar to historical office technology transitions.
✓Consumer Confidence Divergence: October Conference Board index reveals stark income divide—confidence rose for households earning over $200,000 annually while falling for those under $75,000. The jobs availability metric predicts unemployment will remain stable despite overall ambivalent sentiment.
✓School Meal Debt Crisis: Unpaid meal balances doubled from $3,400 median in 2018 to $6,900 in 2024 after pandemic-era universal free meals ended. Families earning just above $59,478 for four people face $1,000-$2,000 annual costs, forcing schools to cover shortfalls from academic budgets.
✓Academic Fraud Scale: Analysis of 20,000 research papers found 4% contained duplicated or manipulated images, with 2% deliberately photoshopped. Paper mills now commercialize fraud on Facebook, selling fake authorships to researchers seeking career advancement, while peer reviewers work unpaid and lack fraud detection training.

What It Covers

Amazon announces 30,000 white-collar layoffs driven by AI automation, while economists find no evidence of new job categories emerging yet. Consumer confidence remains stagnant amid inflation concerns and tariff uncertainty.

Key Questions Answered

•AI Job Transformation Timeline: Prompt engineering jobs failed to materialize as companies trained existing employees instead. MIT research shows jobs are changing subtly rather than creating new categories within three years of ChatGPT launch, similar to historical office technology transitions.
•Consumer Confidence Divergence: October Conference Board index reveals stark income divide—confidence rose for households earning over $200,000 annually while falling for those under $75,000. The jobs availability metric predicts unemployment will remain stable despite overall ambivalent sentiment.
•School Meal Debt Crisis: Unpaid meal balances doubled from $3,400 median in 2018 to $6,900 in 2024 after pandemic-era universal free meals ended. Families earning just above $59,478 for four people face $1,000-$2,000 annual costs, forcing schools to cover shortfalls from academic budgets.
•Academic Fraud Scale: Analysis of 20,000 research papers found 4% contained duplicated or manipulated images, with 2% deliberately photoshopped. Paper mills now commercialize fraud on Facebook, selling fake authorships to researchers seeking career advancement, while peer reviewers work unpaid and lack fraud detection training.

Notable Moment

A microbiologist turned fraud investigator after discovering her own research was plagiarized, then uncovered that scientific publishers earn massive profits while scientists write, review, and pay to access papers entirely for free without quality control.

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Episode Transcript

This podcast is supported by Odoo. Some say Odoo business management software is like fertilizer for businesses because the simple efficient software promotes growth. Others say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it scales with you and is magically affordable. And some describe Odoo's programs for manufacturing, accounting, and more as building blocks for creating a custom software suite. So Odoo is fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business. Odoo, exactly what businesses need. Sign up at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. We're gonna do jobs today, and it's not gonna be great. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace. I'm Kai Ruizdell. It is Tuesday. Today, the October 28. Good as always to have you along, everybody. We begin today with news of the American labor market, some not so happy news, I'm afraid. Amazon said today it's laying off 14,000 corporate workers, the first slice of what's expected to be 30,000 white collar layoffs in all. The online education company Chegg said yesterday it's cutting 45% of its remaining workforce. That's after cutting 20% of it earlier this year. Companies, as you know, lay people off all the time for all manner of reasons. But here in 2025, when white collar workers get let go, one reason in particular seems to be cropping up more and more. Chegg publicly blamed artificial intelligence chatbots for eating its business model, which is helping kids do their homework. Amazon CEO sent employees a note back in June telling them that AI is going to eliminate the need for some kind of jobs in that shop. You know, usually, what happens when transformative technology comes along, the steam engine, the Internet to pick just two, what happens is that old jobs get replaced with new and better jobs. So where are the new AI jobs exactly? Marketplace's Matt Levin gets us going. Remember when everyone wanted to be a prompt engineer? That was the hottest AI job title back in 2023 shortly after ChatGPT launched. Even if you weren't a programmer, if you played with the technology enough to actually get it to do what you wanted it to do, A company might pay you 6 figures to be their professional robot whisperer. Well, it's 2025. Have any of your friends been offered a prompt engineering job yet? That's that's a great question. I'm still wondering when that phone call is coming for me as well. Larry Schmidt is an economist at MIT Sloan School of Management. Turns out the AI got smart enough where lots of businesses could easily teach their employees how to be the types good questions guy. No new salary or title required. We do find evidence that the jobs are changing, but it's it's more subtle than that. It's it's not necessarily that whole new categories of jobs get created. At least not within just three years. Harvard economist David Deming says in the long run, those subtle AI changes will likely evolve jobs into something better than …

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