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My research evaluates how workers participate in the economy. I am particularly interested how the economy can be structured such that the lived experience of workers is valued alongside the creation of consumer surplus. Most people are both consumers and workers, after all. In recent decades, the economy has been oriented toward the efficiency gains that result from specialization. Individuals have sorted into being almost entirely child-rearing oriented, or almost entirely labor-market oriented, and labor-market individuals sort into narrowly defined areas of expertise. This is in tension with what we know from the preference data. Individuals, in general, enjoy mixed consumption bundles. A person is more-likely to enjoy a life in which they are involved in both child-rearing and labor-market activities, and a career that includes variety both within and over time. They might enjoy a career that includes gaps in working distributed across the life-cycle rather than concentrated in an end-of-life retirement phase. Education that occurs throughout life, and responds to changes in preferences and the world, might be preferable to education that is condensed to the initial phase of life.
I am guided by the wisdom that the appropriate strategy changes as the problem evolves. The necessary efficiency required to solve the problem of scarce food, health, and shelter may no longer serve the problem of maximizing human utility in developed economies. The appropriate planner's problem incorporates the value of human production with the experience of that production.​