Best quotes by David Autor on Work

Checkout quotes by David Autor on Work

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ A lot of the work in, say, construction or restaurants involves visual and motor flexibility. It also requires adaptability, in terms of answering questions, giving people directions, or taking orders.

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

  - David Autor
  

• ‟ I did a lot of blue collar work. I also worked as a temp. I did, you know, light construction and cleaning. I did clerical temping. I also fix cars and motorcycles and electronics.

  - David Autor
  

• ‟ I did software development for a while, and I also spent several years directing a nonprofit in San Francisco that did computer education for the poor. I also did a lot of work in fast food.

  - 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 really wrapped up with identity. Work is not just money for most people.

  - David Autor
  

• ‟ While I can't tell you what people are going to do for work 100 years from now, the future doesn't hinge on my imagination.

  - 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