Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" 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
Related Quotes:
" More than any other issue, economists have kind of been boosters for trade. "
David Autor
Any
Kind
Economists
" 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
Giving
People
Say
" 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
" 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
" The Internet promises to open new channels for worker-firm communications. What are the consequences of this opening? "
David Autor
Internet
Consequences
Promises
" 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
" 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
" I think we labor economists like to think of ourselves as being closer to the people. "
David Autor
People
Think
Economists
" History has suggested that the pessimists have been wrong time and time again. "
David Autor
Time
Wrong
Again
" 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
" Work is really wrapped up with identity. Work is not just money for most people. "
David Autor
Work
People
Money
" 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
" 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
" Workers are basically supervisors of machines. "
David Autor
Machines
Basically
Workers
" 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
Rise
Country
World
" 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
" 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
" 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
Overlooked
Task
Fact
" 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
" We have too few college graduates. We also have too few people who are prepared for college. "
David Autor
Who
Prepared
People
" 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
" I work a lot on skill demands and changes in labor markets having to do with technology and with trade as well. "
David Autor
Technology
Work
Skill
" I'm a professor of economics and associate head of the MIT Department of Economics. "
David Autor
Professor
MIT
Economics
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Automation
Tools
People
" 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
" Jobs can change a lot without there being huge changes in employment rates. "
David Autor
Changes
Without
Employment
" 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
Competition
Good
People