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" 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
Study
Money
Thought
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" The Internet promises to open new channels for worker-firm communications. What are the consequences of this opening? "
David Autor
Internet
Consequences
Promises
" I'm a professor of economics and associate head of the MIT Department of Economics. "
David Autor
Professor
MIT
Economics
" There was a great sag in employment beginning in 2000. "
David Autor
Employment
Great
Beginning
" 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
Year
Recognized
End
" Workers and jobs are naturally heterogeneous, and the quality of their interaction when paired is difficult to forecast. "
David Autor
Workers
Difficult
Quality
" 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
Mysterious
People
Trade
" Work is really wrapped up with identity. Work is not just money for most people. "
David Autor
Work
People
Money
" 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
Value
Education
Technology
" 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
You
Future
Imagination
" Workers are basically supervisors of machines. "
David Autor
Machines
Basically
Workers
" 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
Job
Lose
Going
" Markets are, in many settings, self-organizing and 'efficient' in terms of maximizing the welfare of both buyers and sellers. "
David Autor
Settings
Efficient
Markets
" There is no question we are in an era of people asking, 'Is the Robocalypse upon us? "
David Autor
Era
Asking
People
" 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
Power
Labor
Think
" 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
Construction
Blue
Work
" Labor is getting a shrinking slice of a pie that's not growing very much. "
David Autor
Pie
Much
Labor
" 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
Identity
Work
Purpose
" More than any other issue, economists have kind of been boosters for trade. "
David Autor
Any
Kind
Economists
" 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
Cash
Introduction
Here
" 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
Challenge
Change
Work
" We have too few college graduates. We also have too few people who are prepared for college. "
David Autor
Who
Prepared
People
" 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
Work
New
Opportunities
" 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
Us
Work
Why
" 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
Food
Education
Work
" Tax reform done right will improve incentives to invest in U.S. production and to repatriate profits. "
David Autor
Done
Invest
Right
" History has suggested that the pessimists have been wrong time and time again. "
David Autor
Time
Wrong
Again
" 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
People
Research
Good
" 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
Fact
Wages
Two
" 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
Moments
Night
Earth
" 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
Work
Harvest
People