David Autor Quotes

Job displacement is so huge, I'm tempted to not talk about anything other than that.

Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place.

The root of the worker’s resistance to technological change is the conflict between labor as a commodity and labor as a resource. Increased productivity imposes upon the worker a risk of obsolescence.

It [the government] has failed to make the proper adjustments so that the invention of NEW MACHINERY instead of throwing workers out of employment, will only shorten the hours of work for all labor.

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?

Fear is the wrong response to technological unemployment. Focusing on economic flexibility and adaptability - with special attention to eliminating the barriers we've accidentally created to the mobility of the working classes - is the right response to technological disruption.

My honest answer to what's going to happen to the future of jobs is I don't know.

The hope is that we'll continue to create jobs for the vast majority of people. But if the situation arises that this is less and less the case, then we need to rethink, how do we make sure that everybody can make a living?

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.

There might be new technology, but technological progress itself was nothing new - and over the years it had not destroyed jobs, but created them.

Mr. Obama has an ingenious approach to job losses: He describes them as job gains.

We have now under President Obama's leadership had 29 months in a row of private sector job growth. That stretch of positive private sector job growth hasn't happened since 2005. We still have a long way to go, but we are moving in the right direction.

Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for 'machines' are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren't enough of those jobs.

Job growth well in excess of population increase would be a very good thing if it were only that easy.

Two new workers are being added to the population for every one job that is created.

Retail banking in Africa is very weak. You can't go to a village and get money from an ATM or visit a branch of the bank. So people have to use the Internet.

Globalization has redefined the competition for employment and incomes in the United States. Tradeoffs will have to be made between the two.

Jobs will come back when the economy recovers, but they will never be the same.

People are worried about what’s going to happen to their jobs. There’s a lot of off-shoring and out-sourcing taking place. There’s a lot more mobility of labor and of people. Unless we explain what’s happening, people will resort to protectionism and xenophobia.

If our institutions can’t build consensus and respond to the demand of Americans for jobs today, how will we ever do it in a time when artificial intelligence and robotics kick in and five times that number of jobs disappear twice as fast?

Elon Musk is worried about AI apocalypse, but I am worried about people losing their jobs. The society will have to adapt to a situation where people learn throughout their lives depending on the skills needed in the marketplace.

The issue most on Hoosiers' minds is job creation, job retention, and household income.

Bill Clinton's legacy on job creation should be assailed by none and admired by every presidential candidate who hopes to do the same.

The modern economy isn't about the redistribution of wealth, it's about the redistribution of time.

While some people simply want to villainize the private sector, the fact is that the private sector drives jobs growth; we need to channel the energy and innovation of employers to generate opportunities for the entire labor market.