David Autor Quotes

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.

- David Autor

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?

- David Autor

The average worker in 2015 wanting to attain the average living standard in 1915 could do so by working just 17 weeks a year, one third of the time. But most people don't choose to do that. They are willing to work hard to harvest the technological bounty that is available to them. Material abundance has never eliminated perceived scarcity.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

History has suggested that the pessimists have been wrong time and time again.

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

The fact that a task cannot be computerized does not imply that computerization has no effect on that task. On the contrary, tasks that cannot be substituted by computerization are generally complemented by it. This point is as fundamental as it is overlooked.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

Manufacturing value chains are global. Many U.S.-made goods have foreign components. Slapping on tariffs will raise prices and slow imports, but it will make us poorer and impede growth.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

A lot of the work in, say, construction or restaurants involves visual and motor flexibility. It also requires adaptability, in terms of answering questions, giving people directions, or taking orders.

- David Autor

The Internet promises to open new channels for worker-firm communications. What are the consequences of this opening?

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

The long-term policies that will be most effective all have to do with investment: investing in ourselves, investing in opportunities, creating good schools, and creating situations where people can acquire skills that enable them to be successful.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

One would expect that a surge of new automation opportunities in highly paid work would catalyze a surge of corporate investment in computer hardware and software. Instead, the opposite occurred.

- David Autor

Workers are basically supervisors of machines.

- David Autor

Work is what structures adults' lives: it gives us purpose, focus, a set of responsibilities, and an identity. So when people are not participating in the labour market, all sorts of other things often start to go wrong.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

There's a reason I write articles and go out for good dinners: because I'm better at research than cooking. And there are people who are much better at cooking than research, so it's mutually beneficial for us to specialize.

- David Autor

There was a great sag in employment beginning in 2000.

- David Autor

Jobs can change a lot without there being huge changes in employment rates.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

The fact that people are dropping out of the labour force says one of two things: either employers have no use for them, or they have no use for the jobs that are being offered at the wages they can command.

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

Work is really wrapped up with identity. Work is not just money for most people.

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

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.

- David Autor

There is no question we are in an era of people asking, 'Is the Robocalypse upon us?

- David Autor

Trade may raise GDP. But it does make some people worse off.

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

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

- David Autor

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

- David Autor