In his half-year as president, Donald Trump has thankfully, at the bare minimum, not had a chance to follow through on one of his most nitwitted promises: treating the full faith and credit of U.S. Treasury debt like his corporate bankruptcy negotiations. Which means, for now, the American economy is intact. Pretty much the way President Obama left it after presiding over the addition of 15 million jobs, with unemployment hovering below 5 percent and the stock market soaring. (Look to Obama’s farewell speeches for more.)

Yet, for many Americans, high levels of economic insecurity never quite faded after the recession. While the country is divided as an electorate, as a workforce many U.S. employees are stuck in the same financial hamster wheel.

Not long ago, Mark Blyth, a professor of political economy at Brown University's Watson Institute, put forth a master theory on how the current state of capitalism predicted Trump and Brexit. A sharp-tongued, no-nonsense Scotsman, Blyth thinks the traditional yardsticks of national economic health are outdated due to an amorphous, but widening category of making ends meet that bigwig economists are calling “alternative work.”

A Harvard-Princeton study co-conducted last year by Obama’s former top economic aide, Alan Krueger, and labor expert Lawrence Katz estimated 94 percent of net job growth from 2005 to 2015 was made up of this “alt-work.” Much broader than the buzzy phrase “sharing economy” (think Uber and PostMates), alt-workers include temps, independent contractors, and freelancers. One-year intern-fellowship-thingys and on-call employees. Part-time coders and seasonal workers alike.

We called up Blyth to talk about what alt-work means for the future economy, his thoughts on universal basic income, and whether the Baby Boomers are officially the greediest generation in human history. (Spoiler: They are.)

Courtesy of Mark Blyth

GQ: There's some serious dissonance in the labor market right now. On paper, things look good. But if things are so good, why are so many people so pissed off and stressed out?

Mark Blyth: Part of the reason the Krueger-Katz study got so much attention—and to be fair, some of the numbers in that have been disputed—is precisely because it's the first attempt to say, "Okay, well what kind of jobs are being created?" But, people are using it to try to analyze the whole Trump phenomena, so before we get into quality of jobs, unemployment, etcetera... there's two stories out there: There's people who are determined to show one way or another that it's cultural, then you've got people saying, "No, no, it's all about Globalization’s Losers." The interesting thing about the Krueger-Katz study is it cuts to the heart of that ongoing argument. The picture that emerges is Okay, everybody wants a real job. Nobody wants a fake job. Everybody's working two jobs. This is a pile of shit.

Basically what you've got is the rise of part-time or zero hours contracts [Ed. note: In the U.K., employers do not have to provide minimum working hours.] Underemployment is much higher than the reported unemployment figures, etc. The precise statistical demography is going to be different, but essentially, before the Great Recession, through the Great Recession, and especially now as the labor markets are repairing themselves, in some shape or form, employers basically have the whip hand. And because of that they don't need to give you benefits.

But, that's not the only thing that's going on, because there is actually a large number of people who like having one or two jobs, and having the flexibility of moving between these jobs. And the Krueger-Katz study shows a lot of those jobs are well paid. They're not all clustered at the bottom end. It's very unclear at this point which way to call it.