David Autor Zitate auf Englisch

Zitat des Tages von David Autor:

History has suggested that the pessimists have been wrong time and time again.

I think we labor economists like to think of ourselves as being closer to the people.

David Autor

Workers and jobs are naturally heterogeneous, and the quality of their interaction when paired is difficult to forecast.

David Autor

More than any other issue, economists have kind of been boosters for trade.

David Autor

The Internet promises to open new channels for worker-firm communications. What are the consequences of this opening?

David Autor

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

Labor is getting a shrinking slice of a pie that's not growing very much.

David Autor

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

History has suggested that the pessimists have been wrong time and time again.

David Autor

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

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

The U.S. tends to export high-tech goods because we have strong comparative advantage there, and we tend to import labor-intensive and less skill-intensive goods that other countries can do more cheaply.

David Autor

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

Jobs can change a lot without there being huge changes in employment rates.

David Autor

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

Trade may raise GDP. But it does make some people worse off.

David Autor

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

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

Work is what structures adults' lives: it gives us purpose, focus, a set of responsibilities, and an identity. So when people are not participating in the labour market, all sorts of other things often start to go wrong.

David Autor

I'm a professor of economics and associate head of the MIT Department of Economics.

David Autor

Manufacturing value chains are global. Many U.S.-made goods have foreign components. Slapping on tariffs will raise prices and slow imports, but it will make us poorer and impede growth.

David Autor

I work a lot on skill demands and changes in labor markets having to do with technology and with trade as well.

David Autor

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

Workers are basically supervisors of machines.

David Autor