David Autor

But that's because we added expert work.

You make a broadly important, relevant point.

There are broadly distributed gains to these things, right?

So when prices fall, like if all of a sudden it's just, you know, it gets cheaper to translate something, for example, that's great for consumers.

It's great for businesses that use translation.

It's just not good for the workers who perform that service, right?

So we shouldn't think that's just value destruction, but it's often the case that the gains are diffuse and pretty small for any individual, but the losses are very, very concentrated.

And we've seen this in many domains.

One place we saw it really slightly different but very closely related is in the manufacturing sector.

And especially during the 2000s with China's very, very rapid rise as a manufacturing exporter, especially as it joined the World Trade Organization, we saw the loss of at least a million manufacturing jobs directly related to that.

And workers who were displaced did not quickly rebound and find themselves in better employment.

And the communities in which they were located also did not quickly rebound.

And now they are regrowing again, but with a different set of workers.

What this underscores is that the nature of demand or demand for skills can change much more rapidly than people can reskill.

And most career transitions don't occur within a career.

They occur across generations.

Kids in manufacturing workers don't go into manufacturing.

People don't go into administrative work because it's not available.

But usually once you're at mid-career, you've invested in a skill set.

You have a form of expertise that's valuable, that's specialized.