Most people earn less than they're worth. Not because they're not productive, but because the labor market isn't nearly as competitive as it could be.

In this episode, Ben sits down with Ioana Marinescu, professor at Penn and one of the leading researchers on labor market power, to dig into what monopsony actually means, why it matters, and what it would take to fix it.

Topics covered:

• What a perfectly competitive labor market would look like and how far we are from it
• Why the problem isn't just low wages but also hours, conditions, scheduling, and the terms of work that workers can't individually negotiate
• Why unions and competition aren't simply substitutes
• How to define a labor market
• The sleepy monopolist hypothesis: whether product market concentration reduces firms' incentive to hire  ...