45 Quotes by 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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.