Economists come in many different stripes. We have microeconomists who study the intricacies of supply and demand and macroeconomists who search for overarching trends. We have financial economists who fixate on interest rates and econometricians who fashion intricate mathematical models. We have public finance economists, industrial economists, and international economists.

We even have labor economists, specialists who study what’s going on with people who do the actual work that keeps societies running.

President-elect Joe Biden’s new line-up of economic officials and advisers turns out to be packed with labor economists, a bit of encouraging news for those of us who consider America’s egregious economic inequality a clear and present danger. Labor economists tend to worry about inequality, too.

Biden had three slots to fill on his Council of Economic Advisers, the White House panel responsible for informing big-picture economic policy. He filled all three with labor economists.

One of the three, Jared Bernstein, has been a respected face in progressive economic circles for decades. A long-time fixture at the Economic Policy Institute, Bernstein co-authored nine annual editions of EPI’s annual sourcebook on the status of America’s ongoing class war, The State of Working America, and understands the squeeze on America’s workers as well as any economist.

A coauthor with Bernstein on one of those State of Working America editions, Heather Boushey, will also be serving on Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. Boushey has of late been directing the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, an outfit funding and publishing research on inequality that aims to be “relevant, accessible, and informative to the policymaking process.”

“Decades of failed economic policies, based on ideology instead of evidence, and a blind adherence to the idea that markets can solve every problem,” Boushey writes in one of her own recently published papers, “have made our economy and our society more vulnerable” to Covid’s ravages.

The chair of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers will be Cecilia Rouse, the dean of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs and a specialist on education whose work explores how we can “make it easier for people to find long-lasting economic security.”

America faces “a moment of urgency and opportunity unlike anything we’ve faced in modern times,” Rouse related earlier this week, the urgency of a “devastating crisis” and the opportunity “to build a better economy in its wake — an economy that works for everyone.”

Biden’s top economic pick, Janet Yellen as treasury secretary, brings both progressive leanings and some long experience in inside-the-Beltway battles over who gets what in the American economy.

“The past few decades of widening inequality,” Yellen, then Federal Reserve chair, observed in 2014, “can be summed up as significant income and wealth gains for those at the very top and stagnant living standards for the majority,” two trends, she added, that “greatly concern me.”

Biden’s economic policy personnel choices, overall, stack up as much more open to challenging concentrated wealth and power than the Obama administration’s key economic appointees.

“For almost every role so far,” notes an Intercept analysis, “Biden has chosen someone more progressive and less entrenched in Wall Street than the same official under Obama.”