Can We Build a Middle Class Without Factories? - ft. Dani Rodrik

Is the era of manufacturing-led growth officially over? For decades, the path to a stable middle class was paved through industrialization, but today, even manufacturing giants like China are losing millions of factory jobs to automation. In this episode, Bethany McLean and Luigi Zingales sit down with Dani Rodrik, Ford Foundation Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard and author of Shared Prosperity in a Fractured World . Rodrik argues that we have "no other choice" but to look toward the service sector to anchor our future economy. But there’s a problem: we still treat these essential roles as "bottom rung" jobs in terms of pay and respect. Is it possible to elevate a job’s status and pay simply because society needs it to be better? As Rodrik argues, it’s a future we must learn to navigate if we want to preserve a stable society.

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Can We Build a Middle Class Without Factories? - ft. Dani Rodrik is an episode from Capitalisn't by University of Chicago Podcast Network.

This episode is 00:41:36 long.

This episode was published on Jan 22, 2026.

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