MICHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Planet Money - yes, that Planet Money - NPR's podcast about the complex forces that affect your wallet, which is often heard on this program - has a new book out. Longtime contributor Alex Mayyasi and the hosts of the program present brand-new stories gathered from more than a decade of reporting. The book is called "Planet Money: A Guide To The Economic Forces That Shape Your Life," and Alex Mayyasi is here to share more about this project. Good morning. Thank you so much for joining us.
ALEX MAYYASI: Good morning. It's so great to be here.
MARTIN: Yeah. And congratulations.
MAYYASI: Oh, thank you. Thank you so much.
MARTIN: So how did you decide which stories to tell in this book? I guess I'm wondering, like, what's the through line or central idea?
MAYYASI: You know, the idea we had early on that really helped give kind of, like, a shape and through line to the book was thinking of it like a field guide. We almost wanted to be like, you could imagine waking up in the morning, and maybe you would tuck your Planet Money book under your arm before you left the house so it could help you navigate all the economic forces waiting outside your door.
MARTIN: All right. So let's dig into a chapter in the book called "The Hopeful Tale Of The ATM And The Bank Teller." And one of the reasons I wanted to talk about this is there's this fear that all the changes are - changes that we see, the technological changes, aren't necessarily redounding to the benefit of people. This story is the opposite. I mean, ATMs are now ubiquitous.
MAYYASI: Yeah. ATMs and bank tellers are a great case study in automation. And so I talked with a bank teller named Angie Douglas who - in the 1980s, being a bank teller was really, like, her first big adult job. And, you know, she's like, there was a lot of Bon Jovi playing. Everyone had big hair. And then there was this moment where her bank installed its first ATMs. And, you know, it's right there in the name. An ATM is an automated teller machine. It's a machine meant to automate her job. And one of the first questions I asked her after, you know, we chatted about Bon Jovi is, were you worried about the ATMs? Like, were you worried for your job? And she said, no. You know, that was a surprise to me. I was like, are you sure? And she's like, no, I wasn't worried about it.
MARTIN: She sort of paints a picture which I think, if people are of a certain age - will remember. You know, people would get their paychecks on maybe Thursday or Friday, and there would be a line to cash their paycheck or deposit their paycheck or get money for the weekend. So what happened?
MAYYASI: In the '80s and '90s, more and more ATMs get installed, but the number of bank tellers does not plummet. And there are kind of, like, a couple reasons why and a couple insights we can draw from this. One is the fact that actually, as ATMs made running a bank branch cheaper 'cause you didn't need as many bank tellers, banks actually responded by saying, oh. We can open more bank branches to reach more customers. And there can be an effect where, like, if automation makes people more efficient - you need less people - that might actually lower the cost enough that it kind of increases demand. Economists often say that automation technology often doesn't automate jobs. It automates tasks. And so that really happened for bank tellers like Angie.
MARTIN: And also, the other thing that - I didn't remember this - is that people were reluctant to use them, and that is often the case with a new technology. So guess what? People had to train people in how to use them.
MAYYASI: You're absolutely right. I mean, there were banks putting these, like, friendly - creating these, like, friendly mascots to put on every ATMs. So it was like, this isn't a scary machine that swallows your money. And even banks were a little skeptical 'cause they were like, well, if people just go to the ATMs, how - they're not going to come in. We won't have a relationship with them. We can't convince them to use other banking services.
MARTIN: And if we stick with the ATM example, does automation affect the skill level of workers - in this case, bank tellers?
MAYYASI: There are cases where automation can maybe deskill people in some ways, but there are lots of cases where it actually can upskill them, right? Like, the job of a bank teller in many ways became more skilled because you were spending less time, you know, counting cash to hand to customers and more time, you know, helping to run the ATMs, more time doing customer service jobs.
Part of the reason that I do consider the ATM example hopeful is that there is eventually a point in the, let's say, 2010s when the number of bank tellers across the United States does start to decline, in this case not 'cause of ATMs but because of online banking. You know, there are banks that open where their whole kind of shtick is that they don't have bank branches at all. They say, just do your banking online. And so we do see declining numbers of bank tellers then.
MARTIN: Yeah, but you can obviously - we all can see examples, though, of where technology does replace the human. I mean, I'm thinking, like, parking garages. I mean, there used to all be - parking garages had people to take your money, and I can barely think of a place that has a person to take your money now. So of course, that leads me to - you know I'm going to ask - AI. This is obviously something that people are worried about. What does - does your reporting say something about the forecasts of artificial intelligence replacing many of our jobs?
MAYYASI: I mean, I think no one knows for sure, but I think a couple points from kind of economic history can help us better understand what to expect. One thing that's different about AI compared to our bank teller and ATM example is that, you know, an ATM was just meant for banking. AI is what economists and others often call a general-purpose technology, more like electricity or the internet.
And something we see with general-purpose technologies is they often take time to kind of really get adopted in a way that really changes our work. There are these kind of classic case studies about electrification that, at first, you had these factories that - they tried to, like, add electricity to the mix. It didn't really make a big difference. But then what really changed the economy is when you had people building brand-new factories that were built on the idea that there would be readily available electricity. And that completely changed the layout of the factory, the way people worked.
MARTIN: So before we let you go, you know, making a book itself is an economic activity, right? Did you...
MAYYASI: Yeah.
MARTIN: ...All - did the Planet Money team learn something from the process of putting a book together, publishing a book?
MAYYASI: Yeah. There was a lot we learned about books and the book industry. And I like the way that one of our colleagues, Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi, put it as he was finishing up this reporting. And these series, these episodes about the - making the book are still coming out, and the book industry. He said that, like, now when he looks at books in a bookstore, each one seems like a tiny miracle when you think about all the work that went into them - like, all the resources for the paper and the ink, the decisions about where to print them, all the, you know, strategy about how to actually get them into readers' hands and market them so people know about them. So yeah. Like, each book is a tiny miracle is one of our takeaways from this process.
MARTIN: That's Alex Mayyasi. He's the co-author of "Planet Money: A Guide To The Economic Forces That Shape Your Life." Alex, thank you so much for talking with us.
MAYYASI: It's been such a pleasure. Thank you.
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