Rebecca Patterson is not a therapist by training, but talking to her certainly feels therapeutic. A senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an independent director at Vanguard, she gets a lot of calls from CEOs, policymakers, and publications like The New York Times that more or less boil down to this question: What in the world is happening to the economy, and how do I survive it?

People reach out to her because she's smart, but also, we suspect, because she doesn't respond as if she's above it all. These questions aren't just analytical. Rebecca is in it with us. We talked about how the offshoring of US manufacturing jobs beginning in the '70s and some of the transformations that followed might help us read or at least appreciate what artificial intelligence could do to labor markets.

We also asked her about political  ...