Ilana Ettinger

The labor-market conditions that will generate convergence in pay between genders – the technological and institutional changes that reduce the cost of temporal flexibility – will make life better for almost everybody.

It’s because there’s still a widespread reverence for the “ideal worker.” We commonly define the ideal worker as someone who starts working in early adulthood and continues, full-time and full force, for 40 years straight. The concept reflects a breadwinner-homemaker model that dates back to the Industrial Revolution and functioned fairly well

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For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses,... See more

Knowledge work is less structured, more spontaneous, and harder to teach. “Our knowledge,” says Glaeser, “builds on things that we learn from people around us.“ Being close to other knowledge workers makes it easier for us to learn new things and develop new ideas. As such, knowledge work is best done in cities.

What others may see as a moat, we may more earnestly see as “stickiness” or “defensibility” rather than as an outright moat. As we wrote about in  “What is a “Moat” and why does it matter?” , we define moats as  “Proven, perpetuating and permanent unit economic advantages from peers within a competitive set” . These moats need to be rooted in

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