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Why are some jobs better than others? Well, it largely depends on peoples preferences. In other words, one persons dream job may be another persons nightmare. And yet, there are also clearly some universal or at least generalizable parameters that make most people accept the idea that some jobs are objectively better than othersor at least seen by most as generally preferable. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Pay and purpose For example, jobs that pay well, offer stability, and provide opportunities for growth are almost universally considered better. A tenured professorship, a senior engineering role at a reputable company, or a stable medical position all combine financial security with long-term prospects and prestige. In contrast, poorly paid, insecure, or dead-end roles (like gig work with no benefits or exploitative manual labor with long brutal shifts and an alienating experience) are widely viewed as worse, even if a few individuals might value their flexibility or simplicity. Then theres autonomy. Jobs that grant people a degree of control over how and when they work (e.g., creative professionals, entrepreneurs, and researchers) tend to score higher on satisfaction than those defined by micromanagement or rigid supervision. Autonomy is a proxy for trust and respect, and it correlates strongly with both engagement and mental health. Few people dream of jobs where every move is monitored, and most aspire to roles where they can think, decide, and act freely. Unsurprisingly, purpose matters, too. Occupations that contribute to something meaningful (whether saving lives, advancing knowledge, or building something lasting) are viewed as more fulfilling than those that feel transactional or pointless. A teacher inspiring students, a scientist developing a vaccine, or an architect designing a community space are all examples of work that confers a sense of legacy. By contrast, even lucrative jobs can feel hollow when they lack purpose or moral value. This may explain the low correlation between pay and job satisfaction, which highlights the fact that we tend to overestimate the importance of compensation when making career choices. In that sense, the best jobs arent just about rewards, but about how they make people feel about themselves and their place in the world. What the science says A good way to acknowledge these nuances, and yet still predict whether a person is likely to access better jobs, is to examine why some individuals have more choices than others. That is, in any job or labor market, available job or career opportunities may have different degrees of appeal or attractiveness; but from a job seekers perspective, the more employable you are, the more likely to are to find and maintain a desirable jobwhether we look at subjective or objective dimensions of desirability. With this in mind, here are some critical learnings about the science of employability that explain why certain people are better able to access in-demand jobs: (1) Their personalityResearch has consistently shown that employability is largely a function of personality. Traits such as conscientiousness, emotional stability, curiosity, and sociability predict not only who gets hired, but also who thrives once employed. Personality shapes reputation (the way others see us) and reputation determines whether we are trusted, promoted, and retained. For instance, people who are reliable, calm under pressure, and open to learning tend to be more employable than those who are erratic, avoid feedback, or difficult to work with. Moreover, personality also predicts job satisfaction: even in objectively good jobs, neurotic or disagreeable people are less likely to feel content, whereas optimistic and adaptable individuals find meaning in a wider range of roles, and are resilient if not satisfied even with jobs that make most people miserable. In short, who you are determines both the jobs you can get and how you feel about them once you do. (2) Their social classWhile most advanced economies like to think of themselves as meritocracies, the data on social mobility suggest otherwise. In the United States, only about half of children born to parents in the bottom income quintile will ever move up the ladder, and just 7% will reach the top quintile. In the U.K., the class pay gap between working-class and professional backgrounds persists even among graduates. Privilege still buys access to education, networks, internships, and employers willing to take a chance. Sociologists call this social capital; in plain terms, it means your parents contacts and credentials still matter more than your own potential. The world may be trending toward meritocracy, but it hasnt quite arrived there yet. (3) Where you are bornLocation remains one of the most powerful predictors of career outcomes. The Where-to-Be-Born Index ranks countries by the opportunities they afford their citizens, and being born in Switzerland, Denmark, or Singapore gives you exponentially better odds of landing a good job than being born in Haiti, South Sudan, or Bhutan. Access to education, infrastructure, technology, and basic security all shape employability. The same talent, if born in a country with weak institutions or unstable governance, is far less likely to achieve its potential. In that sense, geography is more likely than talent to mean destiny, at least until global mobility or remote work meaningfully narrow the gap. (4) Their values, interests, and preferencesEven within similar contexts, people differ in what they want from work. Psychologists like Shalom Schwartz and Robert Hogan have shwn that our motivational values (e.g., achievement, power, altruism, security, stimulation, and so forth) determine what fit looks like for us. Someone who values adventure and creativity will flourish in startups or design roles, while a person who craves structure and predictability may prefer government or finance. Misalignment between values and job environment (say, a highly independent person in a bureaucratic culture) leads to burnout or disengagement. The better your job matches your values, the more likely you are to perceive it as a good one. Adapt, evolve, and improve In the end, better jobs are not just better paid or better designed; theyre better matched to the people who hold them. Some of this is luck: being born in the right family, in the right country, with the right temperament, will simply afford you a higher range and choice of matches, so you are bound to find more options. But much of it also depends on deliberate self-awareness, namely understanding what kind of environments bring out the best in you, and aligning your career moves accordingly. From a societal perspective, the goal should be to expand access to good jobs by improving education, reducing inequality, and helping people develop the skills and traits that make them employable. That means focusing less on pedigree and more on potential, less on connections and more on competence. Ultimately, the world of work will never be perfectly fair, but it can be fairer. And while none of us can control where we start, we can control how we grow. The most employable people are not just those who fit the system, but those who learn to adapt, evolve, and turn whatever job they have into something better. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-16X9.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/tcp-photo-syndey-1x1-2.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"Get more insights from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic","dek":"Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a professor of organizational psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the co-founder of DeeperSignals. He has authored 15 books and over 250 scientific articles on the psychology of talent, leadership, AI, and entrepreneurship. ","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/drtomas.com\/intro\/","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91424798,"imageMobileId":91424800,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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Below, Gene Ludwig shares five key insights from his new book, The Mismeasurement of America: How Outdated Government Statistics Mask the Economic Struggle of Everyday Americans. Gene is the former Comptroller of the Currency and founder of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP), a nonprofit dedicated to uncovering the truths that official statistics too often obscure. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Politico, The Financial Times, and TIME. Whats the big idea? Americans keep hearing that the economy is strong. Unemployment is low. Wages are rising. Growth is steady. But for millions of families, those headlines feel like a cruel joke. The cost of rent, groceries, and healthcare keep climbing while steady, well-paid work remains out of reach. The disconnect isnt just perceptionits baked into the way we measure economic success. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Gene himselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. We are at an economic tipping point Throughout history, when governments fail to fully appreciate the realities faced by their people, it leads to crisis. The United States may be on the brink of such economic and societal unrest. The unrest that led to the French Revolution and the economic imbalances preceding the Great Depression are both cases in point. In the late eighteenth century, the oppressive economic situation facing the French people went unacknowledged by the royal family for decades. The French ruling class considered the truth about the nations fiscal crisis to be nefariousa threat to their power. Marie Antoinette, when told the peasants had no bread, replied, Let them eat cake! Whether or not the remark is literal or legend, it captures the ruling classs indifference. Soon after, the Revolution erupted, bringing turmoil and suffering to French citizens of every rank and station. The same narrative arc applied a century and a half later when the Great Depression loomed. In both instances, economic data that could have set off alarm bells was availablemore accurate figures that would have revealed the risks emergingand this perspective might have prompted action that could have softened the blow, if not avoided the crises altogether. But the data was either confusing, confounded with other contrary data, or affirmatively hidden. The effects were catastrophic. 2. A quarter of Americans are functionally unemployed The unemployment statistics our government releases monthly are misleading. If someone is looking for full-time employment but finds nothing except a single hour of work in a week, they are considered employed in the eyes of the government. For purposes of official government statistics, this one-hour employee is in the same category as someone secure in a full-time job. This logic extends to wages. Someone who works full- or part-time for a salary that falls below the poverty line (around $25,000 a year for a three-person household) is classified the same way as someone earning $1 million every month. The United States may be on the brink of such economic and societal unrest. LISEPs research team and I consider anyone in the previous two situations to be functionally unemployed. The governments most recent unemployment rate is 4.3 percent, but our research finds that 24.7 percent of American workers are functionally unemployed. 3. Pay statistics ignore part-time and unemployed job seekers The government reports on median wages every quarter. The idea behind their metric is simple and straightforward: If you line up all full-time employees in order of their weekly earnings, the person directly in the middle earns the median wage. But this statistic only considers the wages of people who are currently employed full-time, overlooking millions of part-time workers and unemployed job seekers. So, the moment a low-wage factory worker receives a pink slip, her salary is deleted from the sample altogether. The moment a farm workers seasonal employment ends, his salary is similarly deleted. What this means is the official earnings measure shows an overstated wage that doesnt reflect the reality for many low- and middle-income Americans. It can even appear to improve during economic downturns because low-wage workers are disproportionately affected by layoffs. When the economy went into near freefall during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, government-reported median earnings rose seven percent. During that same period, the percentage of functionally unemployed Americans rose from 25.7 percent to 32.8 percent. 4. Yes, your groceries are more expensive When people talk about inflation, theyre usually referring to changes in the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. The CPI tracks the prices of some 80,000 goods and services, from apples to apartments, baby formula to boats, and much more. The idea is that it gives us a single figure to measure the changing cost of a basket of all consumer products. CPI obscures the true cost of living for working-class Americans. This basket is so wide-ranging that it doesnt reflect how ordinary consumers experience cost-of-living changes, as most Americans are not buying 80,000 things. If the costs of second homes tripled while everything else in the basket stayed flat, the average American household wouldnt feel a thingthe price hike would get averaged in, but it wouldnt impact their life. But the opposite is true. Over the past two decades, the price of jewelry has risen by about 39 percent, while essential goods like bread are up by 112 percent and ground beef by 155 percent. When these items are measured alongside each other in the CPI, the relative stability of luxury items masks the inflation faced by Americans of more modest means. From 2001 to 2023, the CPI points to a 72 percent rise in living costs, yet our analysis of essential expenseshousing, food, transportation, healthcare, and other basicsshows those costs climbed 97 percent. CPI obscures the true cost of living for working-class Americans. 5. We need better statistics The headline statistics we currently employ to understand Americas economy are profoundly misleading and, unfortunately, drive policy. The CPI is pivotal in determining Social Security Benefits, as well as who qualifies for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Head Start, and Pell Grants. At least twelve states and Washington, D.C., used the CPI to determine minimum wage. Our failure to produce statistics that accurately reflect the nations economic reality makes it much harder to shape highly effective policy responsesand harder to identify the tipping point of economic and social unrest. Simply put, when you aim at the wrong target, you miss. Human naturefavors expeditious, rosy analysis rather than the rigor required to glean accuracy. Flaws in widely accepted economic statistics impede important decision-making. In many cases, those who accept economic misrepresentations do so for benign reasons: The data is too difficult to collect with sufficient regularity or precision, or the samples arent sufficiently comprehensive. Human nature favors expeditious, rosy analysis rather than the rigor required to glean accuracy, particularly when accurate numbers may be gloomy. At LISEP, weve developed alternatives to these imperfect statistics. Our True Rate of Unemployment metric includes the functionally unemployed, and our True Weekly Earnings measure includes the entire workforce. Our True Living Cost index narrows the basket of indexed consumer goods to those truly essential to the average American, while our Minimal Quality of Life index measures what it costs to not just get by but to actually have an opportunity to climb the economic ladder. Finally, our Shared Economic Prosperity measure tracks how the countrys economic growth translates into opportunity for all. For decades, policymakers and leaders have judged success or failure by distorted standards, and ordinary Americans have paid the price. Unless we change the headline statistics to reflect the reality Americans actually feel, we will keep steering down the wrong paths. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea App. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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E-Commerce
With more than 100,000 artifacts dating back thousands of years, nearly 900,000 square feet of floor space, a site that spans more than 120 acres, and a total price tag estimated to be more than $1 billion, it’s not hyperbole to call the Grand Egyptian Museum outside Cairo, Egypt, the most significant museum project in recent decades. It’s the kind of blockbuster building that would have even the starriest of starchitects salivating at the chance to lay claim to what’s likely become one of Egypt’s most visited tourist attractions. So, in hindsight, it’s a bit unexpected that the architecture firm that won the museum’s international design competition way back in 2002 was a little-known office from Ireland with no completed projects to its name and only three people on staff. [Photo: Iwan Baan] Dublin-based Heneghan Peng Architects was virtually unknown when its concept was chosen, unanimously, out of more than 1,500 submissions as the winning design. “We hadn’t built any buildings,” says Róisín Heneghan, the firm’s cofounder. “We had one project just starting on site when we won the competition.” A lot has changed since then. The museum had an initial target opening date set for 2007, but several delays caused by the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and the COVID pandemic kept stretching the timeline. Heneghan Peng Architects’ design is now fully built and, as of November 1, open to the public. [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] Thousands of years of history The Grand Egyptian Museum’s design is a sprawling spread of airplane hangar-sized concourses, sculpted landscapes, conservation workshops, and a network of underground storage facilities. The museum building itself is a cavernous space with 12 main galleries and direct views of the pyramids of Giza. A vast entrance hall sits under a tall sawtooth roof that doubles as an open-air pavilion, shading a ticketing area accented by a 30-foot-tall statue of Ramses II that’s more than 3,000 years old. On the facade, throughout the landscape, and even within the building’s structure, pyramid shapes abound. [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] Central to the design, according to Heneghan, is not so much the main building but the placement of the museum itself. “People were saying to us, ugh, you Westerners, you all are so fascinated by the desert, but Egypt is about the Nile,” she says. That led the architects to think first about how the museum should fit into that dichotomy. With a site selected near the famous pyramids in Giza, just on the fringe of Cairo’s urban footprint, it was clear that the museum would sit in the middle space between the desert and the Nile valley, a space that has been carved away by millennia of river flow. “There’s a 50-meter difference in level between one side of the site and the other, because that’s where the desert and the Nile met,” Heneghan says. “When you’re coming out of the city, you see the pyramids on the plateau. So what we decided was that the museum should never go above the plateau level, but that it should exist between the plateau and the Nile Valley.” [Photo: Georges & Samuel Mohsen/The GS Studio/Heneghan Peng Architects Despite grand ceilings capable of holding towering statues, the building sits low to the ground, with a fair amount of its bulk sunk into the landscape. The design of the Grand Egyptian Museum utilizes large walkways and views within the museum to give visitors a zoomed-out experience of the sprawling history represented in the galleries. [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] The first part of the museum visitors see after they enter is a long staircase bordered by thousands of artifacts, sarcophagi, and statuary that tracks the entire 4,000 year span of Egypt’s pharaonic history. It’s a walking crash course for the mostly international visitors to the museum before reaching the top where more discrete sections of Egypt’s ancient history are explored in more depth. Its main galleries cover themes like kings and queens, religious belief systems, and ancient Egyptian society, and the museum features an extensive collection of artifacts from the tomb of King Tutankhamun. The museum’s layout allows each of these galleries to stand on its own, but with visual connections to the others in order to tie them into a broader arc of history. [Photo: Georges & Samuel Mohsen/The GS Studio/Heneghan Peng Architects “The galleries are themed, but at the same time from different points you can see across, so you can make connections across the whole timescale,” Heneghan says. “That helped organize it. If we had tried to make it human-scaled, I think we would have found it more difficult.” [Photo: courtesy Grand Egyptian Museum] A engineering feat The architects also had to grapple with the realities of designing such a massive structure in the desert heat of Egypt. Partly out of consideration for the operational costs of running such a space, they designed the galleries to pull in daylight from lateral angles that’s dappled through metal shading structures and overhangs. This approach also works with the collections on display. “It’s quite a lot of stone,” Heneghan says. “And stone works well with natural daylight.” To handle the sheer weight of the statues on display, the building has incredibly thick concrete floors, which also serve to regulate the building’s climate, absorbing the cool night temperatures and slowly releasing it during the heat of the day. “What we were trying to do is make a really heavy structure, like a church,” Heneghan says. [Photo: Georges & Samuel Mohsen/The GS Studio/Heneghan Peng Architects Though Heneghan Peng Architects are the design architects of the Grand Egyptian Museum, they had plenty of help bringing the concept to fruition. Even at the competition stage, once they were named one of several finalists, they called in extra assistance from the engineering firms Arup and Buro Happold. Cairo-based Raafat Miller Consulting is credited alongside Heneghan Peng Architects as the project’s architect. Given the many delays that have hampered the project, Heneghan says her firm has essentially had very little to do with the design since it was largely finalized around 2009. “Once it went into construction, we weren’t really involved,” she says. The project has evolved since then, with new structural, technological, and material changes that have necessarily altered the overall design. Heneghan says the facade of the building is a departure from a more reserved approach in the initial design, but she accepts that some tweaks were inevitable. “You know, 16 years is a really long time,” she says. But there are also parts of the final museum that were among the architect’s initial thinking about what this museum could be, way back in 2002. Heneghan seems gratified that certain major elements like the grand staircase leading up to the main galleries and the direct views of the pyramids made it through after all these years. “Some things are very much what was envisaged,” she says.
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