Human Systems Lab Seminar: Professor David Autor (9 a.m., 5/8, 33-206)
“Work of the Past, Work of the Future”
Professor David Autor
Ford Professor
MIT Economics
Abstract: Urban U.S. labor markets today are vastly more educated and skill-intensive than they were five decades ago. Yet, urban non-college workers currently perform substantially less skilled work than in prior decades. This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labor markets. The unwinding of the urban non-college occupational skill gradient has, I argue, abetted a secular fall in real non-college wages by: (1) shunting non-college workers out of specialized middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations that require only generic skills; (2) diminishing the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities; and (3) attenuating, to a startling degree, the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades. Changes in the nature of work—many of which are technological in origin— have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers.