Betsey Stevenson
Betsey Stevenson is a labor economist at the University of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy. She served as a member of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2015 and as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor from 2010 to 2011, and in 2023 joined the Board of Directors of Lyft. With Justin Wolfers, she is co-author of the Principles of Economics textbook and co-host of the Think Like An Economist podcast.
Featured
Popular Writing · The New York Times
3 Experts on What Trump Is Doing to the Economy
A New York Times guest essay roundtable with Josh Barro and Greg Mankiw on the economic consequences of the Trump administration's tariff, immigration, and fiscal policy decisions.
August 21, 2025
Research · AI & the Economy
What's There to Fear in a World with Transformative AI? With the Right Policy, Nothing.
An essay on what a post-artificial-general-intelligence world could mean for workers, markets, and the meaning of work — what to worry about, what not to, and which policy levers still matter when machines can do most cognitive labor.
The Economics of Artificial General Intelligence (forthcoming) · 2025
Textbook · 3rd edition
Principles of Economics
An introductory economics textbook by Stevenson and Wolfers, built around a short list of core ideas — cost-benefit thinking, opportunity cost, marginal decisions, interdependence — and applied to the economy students live in. Published in full-year and split Micro / Macro editions, with regional adaptations for Australia / New Zealand and Canada, an international edition from Macmillan, and translations in Italian and Korean.