From automation to China, the economist has forced a reassessment of how labour markets respond to disruption
IT IS hard not to notice it, when you first meet David Autor: the earring, there in the lobe of his left ear, in the shape of a gecko. It has become something of a theme among his students and colleagues, who have given him all sorts of gecko-related paraphernalia. The earring is one half of a pair bought with his wife, before they were married and long before he became the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology.
That experience, too, frustrated him. His psychology work was the mirror image of his time spent coding: he was working on important problems which were maddeningly resistant to systematic analysis. Unsure what to do next, Mr Autor moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and began working with a Methodist church to teach computer skills to disadvantaged kids. That contributed to a budding interest in what exactly the computer age was likely to mean for workers.
As a result both of this research and his experience as a programmer, he realised that the way many economists were thinking about automation was flawed. Researchers often used the education level of the workers employed in a particular job as a good-enough proxy for the complexity of the role and, correspondingly, for how susceptible it might be to automation.
The connection he drew between the extent to which tasks were routine or not, and the ease with which they could be automated away, proved important as policymakers began to grow worried about a “hollowing out” of the workforce.
The researchers knew their work would be explosive. They were themselves surprised by the results, and checked and rechecked their findings in preparation for the storm of criticism they expected to face. The profession was indeed sceptical at first. Mr Autor chuckles that economists’ initial reaction was to insist the work was wrong, then to shift to allowing that it was right but meaningless, before eventually grappling with the work’s implications.
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