Teaching David Autor at Economics of AI This Week

This week in our Economics of AI class, we deeply explored David Autor’s 2024 article, “Applying AI To Rebuild Middle Class Jobs”. He’s been giving talks on this topic, including a keynote, which you can find on YouTube. Here’s a few:

I asked David if he would mind coming to my class via zoom as a guest lecturer to talk about AI and work, and he’s going to be doing that on April 17th! I’m super fired up. What a fantastic guy. You can watch my old interview with him for the podcast here:

In this substack, I’m going to share what I learned in prepping the lecture around that paper, and how it fit with the broader themes of the class, which are inequality, prosperity, labor, technology, and of course, artificial intelligence.

But first, before I dive into it, let me ask my own own artificial intelligence, Cosmos, flip a few coins. Heads, Heads and Heads.

So that’s heads, best out of three, so this post is paywalled. Thank you again everyone who subscribes to the substack. I appreciate all you do to support what I work on in what I tend just refer to as “my mixtape stuff”, which this substack has increasingly become the central portal and hub organizing it, whether it’s the writings, the Mixtape University, the podcast, or even the ability to heavily discount the workshops provided by all the speakers so that lower income students can pay much lower prices. So thanks. I hope you find this substack about David Autor’s paper, but also the sweep of his work, interesting.

Also, I wanted to share one more thing. If you download the substack app from the App Store, you can actually not just read this substack there — you can actually listen to their text-to-speech AI voice read it. And I’ve found that’s a much more enjoyable thing for me to do when I drive into work, and listen to some substacks. I’ve been really enjoying Dr. Psych Mom. She writes about a lot about relationships, and even though I’m single, I still enjoy listening to her insights. Here’s one about being married to someone with bipolar and “complicated grief”.

My Dad Died And I Can No Longer Feel Emotions

Skill Biased Technological Change vs Task Models

David Autor’s influential work on the computerization of work, and the hollowing out of the middle class from automation and globalization, is well known, but I actually until this class had not read it closely. I knew the skill biased technological change literature, and its conjectured role in rising labor market inequality starting around the 1970s, because we read those papers pretty closely in my labor field course in grad school. This was work by Claudia Goldin, Larry Katz, Alan Krueger (see this reply by Dinardo and Pischke), Chinhui Juhn and Kevin Murphy, just to name a few. But David Autor was not someone we read in that class, and I just had my buried in the sand for a long time so that when I would hear about his work, it was embarrassingly pretty thin and just based on topics or applications.