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. On this reckoning workers with some post-secondary education ought to be less vulnerable to march of the robots than those who lacked even a college degree.
Mr Autor suggested that it was not the skill set of the worker which mattered, but the task to which the worker applied her skills. Some tasks that are trivially easy for machines (like multiplying 15-digit numbers) are very difficult for humans. Others that humans handle effortlessly, like manoeuvering around furniture while tidying an office, are incredibly difficult for machines. The “task approach” to labour markets that emerged from this work has become a critical tool in analysing the ways in which all sorts of disruptive events affect workers.
“David Autor, the academic voice of the American worker“ from The Economist
We need to revive good jobs in the kinds of places that are most conducive to family life.
The reprisal of Elizabeth Warren’s 2004 book The Two-Income Trap has sparked a valuable debate within the conservative policy community. Co-authored with her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi, the book argues that the rise of two-income households has created a bidding war over goods like housing and child care, offsetting apparent household income gains and leaving families in a more precarious financial state.
Tucker Carlson thinks the book is onto something and that the GOP should become the party of traditional families. Helen Andrews thinks so too, but laments the contemporary dearth of female voices leading the charge. Other conservative thinkers aren’t so sure, particularly those like Scott Winship who have long defended the encouragement of maternal work as a pillar of conservative anti-poverty policy.
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Indeed, the forces driving the rising cost of housing and child care run much deeper than female labor force participation. New research from the economist David Autor suggests they may even be a side effect of structural trends in our modern, post-industrial economy.
There have been a myriad of articles and reports highlighting that people move less than they used to. According to Autor, however, much of this observed effect is an artifact of the new geography of work. In the past, people moved twice: first, while young, from the country to the city, often for school, and then back to the country or suburbs to start a family.
People are still moving. But today, due to the college wage premium and the clustering of high-income jobs in cities, young folks tend to move to the city and then stick around. A new report from the Social Capital Project shows how this dynamic has contributed to brain drain in regions with population decline. It also bids up the cost of living in the receiving metro areas thanks to the—partly intrinsic, partly artificial—scarcity of real estate, despite stagnant wages for those without a post-secondary education. For working-class families in particular, urban living now all but necessitates two full-time earners.
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Nonetheless, getting the order of cause and effect matters enormously for formulating a useful policy response. In Warren’s narrative, a cultural shift toward two income households caused a bidding war, à la keeping-up with the Joneses. But the gravitational pull of workers into cities would have arguably caused a bidding war and transition to dual-earner households anyway, cultural politics be damned.
Discouraging mothers from working won’t deflate household costs if those costs are a key reason moms work more than they prefer to in the first place. Child benefits, paid family leave, and relaxing restrictions on housing supply have a better chance at helping, but if the structural story is correct, we have to think bigger.
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Historically, the term for rebalancing an economy away from a half-dozen lucrative cities and professions is “industrial policy.” A scary concept in more laissez-faire circles, it’s time pro-family conservatives took the idea seriously. Policies aimed at reviving meaningful, well-paid work in rural regions and smaller cities would create the kind of jobs and in the kind of places that are most conducive to family life. A more diversified economy would simultaneously lessen the demand surge in today’s magnet cities and expand labor market opportunities for those most likely to be net losers in the upper class’s place-based bidding war.
Making sense of the ‘vast uncertainty’ of AI and jobs—understanding models of change is more useful than spraying numbers around. New post at. The Next Wave.
I wrote here, critically, about the recent IMF report on the impact of AI and jobs. I was doing some research for a report I was writing recently which required me to go back into the same area, and found an article by David Autor that has a different view. Not more cheerful, necessarily, but maybe more honest about the radical uncertainty that pervades this whole area.
Autor is a credible voice…
Don't Fear The Future Of Work - no really, you shouldn't. It's just that this piece doesn’t provide any reasons as to why you shouldn't.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is the source of this piece on The Future of Work. I don’t disagree with the headline, but the article itself falls short of providing solace. In fact it falls short of being an article – but that’s another story.
An altogether disappointing piece that ends …
“I really come away from this concerned about the direction [of work], but optimistic…
We have an unprecedented opportunity to rein in capitalism’s excesses and reshape our democracy. Here’s how experts from MIT, Harvard, and more would tackle the biggest problems.
Big, dense cities offered not just better pay for lower-skilled workers; cities offered them better kinds of jobs.
This is much less true today, as workers hurt by the decline in manufacturing know. Because of this, cities no longer offer low-skilled workers the economic advantages they once did, according to new analysis by the M.I.T. economist David Autor.
Workers, whether with a college degree or not, could long count on earning more in denser urban areas than in rural ones. Today, that pattern holds for highly educated workers — and has in fact grown much stronger. For workers without any college education, the added wage benefits of dense cities have mostly disappeared in Mr. Autor’s data:
“What if Cities Are No Longer the Land of Opportunity for Low-Skilled Workers?“ from New York Times
Think big tech is troubled? From Google to Apple, it's just getting started
Business Standard: Silicon Valley ended 2018 somewhere it had never been: embattled.
Lawmakers across the political spectrum say Big Tech, for so long the exalted embodiment of American genius, has too much power. Once seen as a force for making our lives better and our brains smarter, tech is now accused of inflaming, radicalizing, dumbing down and squeezing the masses. Tech company stocks have been pummeled from their highs. Regulation looms. Even tech executives are calling for it.
In the face of such a sustained assault, this might be a good moment for Big Tech to lie low. It could devote some of its mountains of cash — Apple alone has $237 billion in the bank — to genuine good works, and allay widespread fears it wants to control your data and your destiny.
That is not the path the companies are taking.
“The tech companies are not flinching,” said Bob Staedler, a Silicon Valley consultant. “Nothing has hit them on the nose hard enough to tell them to cut back. Instead, they are expanding. They’re going around the country acquiring the best human capital so they can create the next whiz-bang thing.”
ALSO READ: From foldable devices to smarter assistants, technology to expect in 2019
There is so much of life that remains undisrupted. The companies are competing to own the cloud — to become, in essence, the internet’s landlord. They have designs on cities: Google made a deal in 2017 to reimagine a chunk of waterfront Toronto from the ground up. Amazon is reworking the definition of community from the inside, as warehouses in rural areas provide the urban middle class with everything they want to stay home all weekend. BS
