Top 30 David Autor Quotes

Markets are, in many settings, self-organizing and ‘efficient’ in terms of maximizing the welfare of both buyers and sellers.

I’m not yet convinced that we will face an unemployment problem created by AI. There will certainly be some occupations eliminated – drivers of vehicles, many production jobs, etc. Whether this creates mass unemployment depends on how quickly this happens. If it happens overnight, it will be a huge disruption.

The end of the ‘tech bubble’ in the year 2000 is, of course, widely recognized, as the NASDAQ stock index erased three-quarters of its value between 2000 and 2003.

Tax reform done right will improve incentives to invest in U.S. production and to repatriate profits.

If I lose my job at a furniture factory where I’ve worked for decades, no amount of cheaper toys and raincoats at Wal-Mart is going to make me whole again.

If you think about it, many of the great inventions of the last 200 years were designed to replace human labor. Tractors were developed to substitute mechanical power for human physical toil.

I work a lot on skill demands and changes in labor markets having to do with technology and with trade as well.

I did software development for a while, and I also spent several years directing a nonprofit in San Francisco that did computer education for the poor. I also did a lot of work in fast food.

The U.S. tends to export high-tech goods because we have strong comparative advantage there, and we tend to import labor-intensive and less skill-intensive goods that other countries can do more cheaply.

Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn’t this make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete? Why are there still so many jobs?

There was a great sag in employment beginning in 2000.

There’s always new work to do. Adjusting to the rapid pace of technological change creates real challenges, seen most clearly in our polarized labor market and the threat that it poses to economic mobility. Rising to this challenge is not automatic. It’s not costless. It’s not easy. But it is feasible.

I’m a professor of economics and associate head of the MIT Department of Economics.

I had never taken any economics. I literally didn’t know what it was. I thought it was just about the study of money.

Workers and jobs are naturally heterogeneous, and the quality of their interaction when paired is difficult to forecast.

In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded and crashed down to Earth less than two minutes after takeoff. The cause of that crash, it turned out, was an inexpensive rubber O-ring in the booster rocket that had frozen on the launchpad the night before and failed catastrophically moments after takeoff.

Economists have understood since the Victorian era that the main benefits of trade come from comparative advantage: the idea that people can specialize in what they’re good at and then benefit from exchange. The principle is no more mysterious than specialization in the labor market.

Workers are basically supervisors of machines.

I think we labor economists like to think of ourselves as being closer to the people.

People tend to think about trade as if it’s competition between companies – if Apple wins, Google loses. But that’s false. Trade makes nations better off in general. Now, I want to be clear. I’m not saying that everything about trade is good and beneficial. Trade also has costs.

China’s rise is really a kind of a world historical event. This is the largest country in the world. It has caused a wholesale substantial contraction of U.S. manufacturing employment.

While I can’t tell you what people are going to do for work 100 years from now, the future doesn’t hinge on my imagination.

The last 200 years, we’ve had an incredible amount of automation. We have tractors that do the work that horses and people used to do on farms. We don’t dig ditches by hand anymore. We don’t pound tools out of wrought iron. We don’t do bookkeeping with books! But this has not, in net, reduced the amount of employment.

Here’s a startling fact: in the 45 years since the introduction of the automated teller machine, those vending machines that dispense cash, the number of human bank tellers employed in the United States has roughly doubled, from about a quarter of a million to a half a million.

More than any other issue, economists have kind of been boosters for trade.

I did a lot of blue collar work. I also worked as a temp. I did, you know, light construction and cleaning. I did clerical temping. I also fix cars and motorcycles and electronics.

There’s never been a better time to be a worker with special skills or the right education, because these people can use technology to create and capture value.

We have too few college graduates. We also have too few people who are prepared for college.

Computers were programmed to swap out error-prone, inconsistent human calculation with digital perfection.

Labor is getting a shrinking slice of a pie that’s not growing very much.