David Autor Quotes

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.

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

If you look at it from just a pure economic basis, technology is replacing all of the jobs robots can do, and machinery is replacing the jobs that humans once held. If we don't train our children to imagine, to create, they're going to be unemployable.

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

Tech is important, but if you look at even the successful tech start-ups, you see they employ only dozens of people at most. Tech is never going to have the impact on the job market that manufacturing has.

We know the job market is changing by the minute.

I'm working with the New Dems, who are talking about the future of work, which is something I'm very interested in in New Jersey.

What people are now realizing is that this formula that technology destroys jobs and creates jobs, even if it's basically true, it's too simplistic.

The bottom line is that while automation is eliminating many jobs in the economy that were once done by people, there is no sign that the introduction of technologies in recent years is creating an equal number of well-paying jobs to compensate for those losses.

The technologists and entrepreneurs I know are generally good people. If they were given a choice, 'Do your job and eliminate normal jobs' or 'Do your job and create abundant opportunities,' they would choose the latter. Most of them would happily even take a small hit to do so. But this isn't a choice they're given.

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

The more the division of labor and the application of machinery extend, the more does competition extend among the workers, the more do their wages shrink together.

We believe that if men have the talent to invent new machines that put men out of work, they have the talent to put those men back to work.

Efficiency innovations are a natural part of the economic cycle, but these are the innovations that streamline process and actually reduce the number of available jobs.

Amazon didn't create any jobs. Amazon probably destroyed a million jobs in our economy.

Jobs are critically important, but looking at economic change through the impact on jobs has always been a difficult way to think about economic progress.

The fact of the matter is, this is a very dynamic economy we have, and in this dynamic economy, you have a lot of job gains, but you also have job loss.

In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won't create better jobs with more pay.

There is a large change coming in the jobs of America and competition from abroad. We should prepare for it rather than let history overwhelm us.

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.

Look at trade and automation: two competing but slightly overlapping forces in the shrinking of the duration of jobs right now. We have to be able to talk honestly about how disrupted this world is going to be, and it is crazy to mislead people and say we're going to bring back all of the big factory jobs by creating a protectionist regime.

Technological unemployment is scary for those affected - but has always gone hand in hand with economic progress.

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.

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.

Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs.