The Context Window with David Deming Podcast

David Deming

The conversations that matter most need context. Harvard Dean David Deming talks with leaders and thinkers about how they became who they are — the detours, the doubt, and the people who helped along the way. thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

Episodes

  1. 3d ago

    How social skills can get you paid in the age of AI

    You understand people. You can read a room. Why would anyone pay you for that? In the final part of his series on work in the age of superintelligent AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - explains why social skills create economic value. Specialization makes the modern economy productive, but its gains depend on coordination, and coordination is costly: meetings, handoffs, misunderstandings, work that melts away between people. People with strong social skills reduce the melt, and the same skill that makes a good teammate makes a good manager. David shares new evidence that managerial skill is real, measurable, and seriously underpriced: managers selected for economic decision-making skill raise team performance, store sales, and profits, while the people most eager to be in charge perform worse than managers chosen by lottery. In one retail chain, a good manager was worth $180,000 to $240,000 a year in added profit. And the skill of leading human teams turns out to be nearly identical to the skill of leading AI agents. Then the million-dollar question: even if humans keep working, will the work pay? David explains why the bleakest wage forecasts rest on a fragile assumption, and why, in an O-ring economy, automating most of the production chain can make the remaining human bottleneck - trust, judgment, the ability to make the sale - the most valuable link of all. Try the assignment game: https://skillslab.dev For full show notes and new episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    How social skills can get you paid in the age of AI

  2. Jul 15

    Why social skills will be increasingly valuable in the age of AI

    AI already beats humans at reading the emotion on your face. So why can't it read the room? In part two of his series on work in the age of superintelligent AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - argues that technology doesn't end work, it reprices skills. Mechanized farming made muscle cheap and literacy valuable. As AI makes intelligence abundant, the next skill to be repriced upward is one we barely think of as a skill at all. Along the way: what a benchwarmer taught the NBA about hidden value, what a parking lot full of food trucks reveals about the limits of machine social reasoning, the research finding that being a team player matters about as much as IQ, and why a relationship is not a transcript. Try the PAGE emotion-perception test: https://skillslab.dev Watch part one, “AI Will Beat You at Everything. You’ll Still Have a Job”:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWaq1rI4D6w For full show notes and new episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming:https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Why social skills will be increasingly valuable in the age of AI

  3. Jul 8

    Superintelligent AI won't end human work. Here's the math.

    What happens when AI is better than humans at every single job task? Work disappears, right? Wrong. David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - makes the case that even superintelligent AI won't end human work, thanks to the oldest non-trivial idea in economics. In part one of a two-part series, David retells the story of the mathematician who escaped Poland days before the German invasion and spent years daring Paul Samuelson to name one true, non-trivial proposition in the social sciences. Then the math on why a collaborator who is worse at everything still adds value. Humanity's edge turns out to be the way we learn - we pick up new tasks from tiny amounts of data at almost no cost, while a frontier model burns a billion dollars in training and still has to search the web to name the current president. Comparative advantage holds no matter how good AI gets - as long as compute isn't free. Next week in part two: the skills and jobs that will matter most in the age of AI. Subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Superintelligent AI won't end human work. Here's the math.

  4. Jul 1

    Walter Isaacson on the sentence that built a country

    Walter Isaacson has written the definitive lives of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and Jennifer Doudna. In his new book, The Greatest Sentence Ever Written, he turns from people to a single line — the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence — and argues it was never a description of America but a mission statement the country has spent 250 years trying to live up to. He joins David Deming to explain why Jobs and Musk were both “jerks,” whether empathy is a weakness, how Benjamin Franklin’s two-word edit changed the meaning of equality, what we are getting wrong today that our descendants may judge us for, why every one of his students must use AI, and what a 390-year-old university owes a country about to turn 250. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

  5. Jun 24

    Why new college grads can't find jobs (it's not AI)

    As long as we’ve been collecting data, new college graduates had better odds of landing a job than the average American worker. But that flipped after the pandemic. Although the obvious suspect is AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - thinks the obvious suspect is probably innocent. In the first solo episode of The Context Window, he studies the scene of the crime: why the timing points to remote work rather than AI, how the pandemic quietly “containerized” white-collar work and made it legible to machines, and why he is willing to put a marker down that today is as bad as AI is ever going to be for young workers. The corporate ladder is good for developing talent among a chosen few. Now that ladder is crumbling, which may be a good thing in the long-run. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Why new college grads can't find jobs (it's not AI)

  6. Jun 17

    Deval Patrick is not a "self-made" man

    Deval Patrick grew up in a South Side Chicago tenement, sharing one of two beds with his mother and sister, and went on to become the first Black governor of Massachusetts. But in this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, he keeps correcting the version of that story people like to tell. His life did not begin with the scholarship to Milton Academy, he insists, but years earlier, with the teachers in crowded Chicago classrooms who decided he was worth the trouble — a lottery ticket, he says, is only as good as what you make of it. Along the way he saved a man ninety minutes from execution, sued Bill Clinton and then went to work for him, became the country's top civil-rights official before forty, and ran for president for about fifteen minutes. Holding it together is the line his grandmother gave him: we are not poor, we are broke, because broke is temporary. Patrick served as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights under President Clinton and two terms as Governor of Massachusetts. He returned to Harvard in 2022 to teach at the Kennedy School. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Deval Patrick is not a "self-made" man

  7. Jun 10

    Lloyd Blankfein thinks the next financial crisis will be worse

    Lloyd Blankfein went from public housing in East New York to the top of Goldman Sachs, which he led through the worst financial crisis since the Depression. In this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, the former Goldman CEO explains why he thinks the next big crisis will be harder to contain than 2008, why the worst move an ambitious young person can make is to skip college to chase money, and what a 390-year-old university owes the country it helped found. Plus the $500 check that changed how he saw Harvard, the "vampire squid," and the law of conservation of risk. Lloyd Blankfein is the Senior Chairman of Goldman Sachs and the author of Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs. For show notes and full episodes, subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

  8. Jun 3

    Ross Douthat on the case for God

    Ross Douthat has spent his career making the case for God and against the meritocracy, to readers who mostly disagree with him. In this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, the New York Times columnist argues that belief in God is more reasonable now than it was a century ago, that consciousness may be the most supernatural thing we know, and that Harvard made him more ambitious and was not good for his soul. From there they go to meritocracy and magnanimity, admission by lottery, votes for parents, and what a 390-year-old university owes a country about to turn 250. Ross Douthat is a columnist at The New York Times, host of the Times Opinion podcast Interesting Times, and the author of seven books, including Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class. He graduated from Harvard College in 2002. Subscribe to The Context Window with David Deming: https://thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

    Ross Douthat on the case for God

  9. May 27

    Angela Duckworth: 'Grit is not enough'

    Angela Duckworth is famous for the study grit. But in this conversation with Harvard Dean David Deming, she tells a messier story: ten years of feeling "capital-L Lost" after Harvard, the loneliness of achievement, and why she now believes perseverance only works when your situation lets effort pay off. Her new book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, argues that grit is necessary but not sufficient — and that the people and places around you may matter just as much as the qualities you carry inside. Angela is a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow, and the author of Grit. She graduated from Harvard College in 1992 with the Fay Prize for best senior thesis, went on to a Marshall Scholarship at Oxford, worked at McKinsey, taught in public schools, ran a nonprofit, and started her PhD at 32 under Martin Seligman. You can find the full show notes here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

  • 9 Episodes

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The conversations that matter most need context. Harvard Dean David Deming talks with leaders and thinkers about how they became who they are — the detours, the doubt, and the people who helped along the way. thecontextwindowpodcast.substack.com

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