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Luis Garicano on Spain, Europe, and the Future of Work

51 min
AboutEducationWork & labour
Hosted byTyler Cowen

Luis Garicano has one of the more unusual résumés in economics: trained at the University of Chicago Booth School under Gary Becker, Kevin Murphy, and Sherwin Rosen, he left academia for a stint as a member of the European Parliament before returning to research, now at the London School of Economics for a second time. His new book, Messy Jobs, co-authored with Jin Li and Yanhui Wu, argues that AI won't cause mass unemployment for a surprising reason: it will make jobs messier, not simpler, and messiness is precisely what AI struggles with.
Tyler and Luis start their conversation with Spain — housing, NIMBYism, and the productivity crisis; Spanish literature and why the Civil War still looms so large; and what Chicago taught Luis about party discipline in European politics. Then to the EU's unanimity problem, capital markets, and Denmark's flexicurity model; a round of overrated-versus-underrated on Rosalía, Penélope Cruz, and Sgt. Pepper's; and finally into Messy Jobs — why retraining programs fail, whether AI's leisure dividend has arrived, and whether Spain could ever achieve AI sovereignty.
Read a transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on YouTube.
Recorded July 28th, 2026.
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Timestamps:
00:00:00 - Intro
00:01:05 - On Spain's housing and political paralysis
00:11:08 - On Spanish literature and the Civil War
00:16:52 - On Basque and Catalan public finance
00:18:59 - On party discipline and political selection
00:22:03 - On the EU's unanimity problem
00:28:47 - On flexicurity and European labor rigidity
00:30:24 - Overrated vs. underrated
00:33:12 - On the future of Spanish language
00:35:01 - On why AI won't cause mass unemployment
00:48:38 - On what's next
00:50:11 - Outro

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