David H. Autor is the Daniel and Gail Rubinfeld Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, and a Google Technology and Society Visiting Fellow. His scholarship examines how technological change and globalization reshape the labor market, focusing on job polarization, skill demands, earnings, inequality, and even electoral outcomes.
Autor is one of the architects of the task-based, or “task model,” approach to thinking about automation, which analyzes how technology substitutes for some tasks while complementing others rather than treating whole jobs as automatable or not. His 2015 essay “Why Are There Still So Many Jobs?” is among the most influential pieces of public economic writing on automation, arguing that machines both replace and amplify human work, which is why employment persists. He also documented the hollowing-out of middle-skill routine jobs, the phenomenon known as labor-market polarization. Separately, with David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, his work on the “China shock” showed that import competition from China cost the United States roughly a million manufacturing jobs and about 2.4 million jobs overall.
As a co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Labor Studies Program, Autor sits at the center of empirical labor economics. His careful, data-driven temperament makes him a frequent counterweight to both techno-utopian and apocalyptic predictions, and his task framework underpins much of how economists now reason about the labor effects of AI.