When economic news, especially that revolving around working, gets reported, it tends to get reported in aggregate – the total number of jobs affected or created, the average wage paid, the impact on a defined geographic area. This is an approach labor economist David Autor knows well. But he also knows that the aggregate often masks the effect on the individual.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor, Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, examines two momentous changes to global economics and how they play out for individuals. He explains to interviewer David Edmonds how the rise of China’s manufacturing dominance and the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence likely are and will affect individual people accustomed to do specific tasks for pay.

What he finds is not as straightforward as the headlines alluded to above. Take China and its remarkable ascent and how that impacted the United States.

“[The rise] benefited a lot of people. It lowered prices. It allowed American companies to kind of produce a lot of products more cheaply. You know, it’s hard to imagine Apple’s growth without China, for example, to do all that assembly, which would have been extremely expensive to do in the United States. At the same time, it displaced a lot of people, more than a million, and in a very geographically and temporarily concentrated way, extremely scarring the labor market. Now those people also got lower prices, but that’s not even remote compensation for what they lost. And now there are new jobs — even in those places where those trade shock occurs — but it’s not really the same people doing them. It’s not the people who lost manufacturing work.”

Concerns about these shocks have been widespread in the 2020s, but the tough if erratic talk about tariffs coming from the U.S. president centers on the idea of restoring something (while ignoring question of that thing ever existed or if it makes sense to go back). Autor argues that the administration actually is asking the right question – but they are arriving at the wrong answers, He notes that the U.S. currently has a half a million unfilled manufacturing jobs open already, a sizeable figure relative to the nation’s 13 million manufacturing workers. But that number itself is roughly a tenth of China’s 120 million.

“We cannot compete with them across every front. .. What we should be very deeply worried about is losing the frontier sectors that we currently maintain. Those are threatened. So aircraft, telecommunications, robotics, power generation, fusion, quantum computing, batteries and storage, electric vehicles, shipping. These are sectors that we still have (except for shipping, actually) but China is making incredibly fast progress, and instead of trying to get commodity furniture back, we need to think about the current war we’re in, not the last war.”

At MIT, Autor is co-director of the Blueprint Labs, whose “scholars apply their unique expertise to pressing problems in education, health care, and the workforce,” and co-director of the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative. Off campus, he is a research associate and co-director of the Labor Studies Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

To download an MP3 of this podcast, right-click this link and save. The transcript of the conversation appears below.

David Edmonds: Based at MIT, David Autor is one of the world’s leading labor economists. He’s well known in particular for his research into how the rise of China has affected employment in the US, as well as how the labor market adapts to new technology. David Autor, welcome to Social Science Bites.

David Autor: Thank you. It’s a delight to be here. I’m looking forward to this conversation.

David Edmonds: We’re talking today about the labor market. You’re a labor economist, naive question, but what does a labor economist do?

David Autor: Great question, which I’ve never been asked, by the way. You know, the labor market I think of as the most important social institution, right? Most people spend a great deal, even the majority of their waking hours, in work. Work doesn’t just provide income, but it provides identity, status, friends, purpose, and in some sense, I also think it’s kind of the ballast of the ship of state of democracies, because in countries where most people are working, everyone is viewed as a contributor as well as a claimant. So labor economists study things that affect employment, opportunity, skills, earnings mobility, and not just on average, not as you know, what is GDP? What is the stock market? But like the distributional consequences, how are different people faring?

You can have a labor market that seems to be doing well on average, and yet no one’s at the average. Some people are doing extremely well. Some people are doing extremely poorly. So we care a lot about the distribution. A lot of my work focuses on workers without a four-year college degree — who are the majority of American workers, by the way. Forty percent of US workers have a four-year college degree. Sixty percent do not. So, we ought to be especially attuned to how that group is doing.

David Edmonds: I want to get onto that distinction later between the highly educated and the less highly educated. But is it true to say that a labor economist is primarily interested in change, in shocks to the labor market, or how the labor market adapts to change.

David Autor: Certainly, that’s the most interesting part. But even without shocks, we’d say like, “Well, what determines the distribution of income? Why do some people make more than others? Why do some people advance over the lifetime and some do not? Why are some employed and some unemployed?” But certainly, the work that I do is very focused on two sources of change. One is technological and all of the incredible technological developments over the last five decades that have been beneficial, but also disruptive and in many cases unevenly beneficial and harmful to some. Then the other source of labor market change that I’ve studied a lot over the last more than a decade is the effect of China’s monumental rise as a kind of economic and manufacturing superpower – how that’s affected workers and communities the United States.

David Edmonds: We’re going to talk about both those areas. What are your key sources of data? Where do you get your stats from?

David Autor: Well, you know, a lot of my work uses representative data sources that are produced by the US government. So, the Census of population, the American Community Survey, the Dictionary of Occupational Titles and the O*NET, which are data on occupations and what people do. And then also data on trade flows by goods across countries. I use that a lot.

And then I study specific technologies and try to understand how they may be changing the tasks that people do. I think much more in terms of tasks than jobs. So, a job is a constellation of different tasks. You do many, many things you obviously, you write your research, use talk on podcasts, you spend time fixing your equipment to make that work right. Those are all part of your job. And so technology primarily displaces or creates new tasks, rather than wholesale eliminating jobs. But that’s not always good. If your things that you do that are valuable are all of a sudden automated, well, your skills, that expertise that you painstakingly develop, is suddenly less valuable.

David Edmonds: So, that’s interesting, because somebody who does a part of what I do might now self-identify as a podcaster, but the skill set is just identical to what a radio broadcaster did 25-30 years ago.

David Autor: Yeah. I mean, occupations are the words we use to describe things, types of jobs. But first of all, they’re broad. And second of all, within an occupation, there’s incredible diversity of what people do and the range of things they do. And then, moreover, there are new things that are being created that didn’t exist, right? A podcaster is a new job …

David Edmonds: … a new job with old skills.

David Autor: Yeah. So sometimes it’s a remix, a remix of existing skills. Many times, what I think of as new work is work that requires expertise that didn’t previously exist or wasn’t previously valuable. That expertise could be as someone who does prompt engineering, right, for example, or, you know, there was a time when we didn’t need pilots. We didn’t need people who were air traffic controllers. We just didn’t have those technologies. A lot of new work is a very important part of the way the labor market evolves and demands expertise in new things that we do.

But I want to be clear, not all new work comes from new technology. It also comes from changing tastes, ch