David Autor

David Autor is the economist the world turned to when the machines learned to write legal briefs. Born in 1967, trained in psychology at Tufts before earning his doctorate in public policy at Harvard, Autor spent his pre-academic years directing computer skills education for economically disadvantaged communities in San Francisco and South Africa—an origin that would leave a watermark across a career nominally about labor markets but really about the institutional conditions that determine whether technology’s gains are distributed or concentrated. His foundational contribution, developed with Frank Levy and Richard Murnane in a landmark 2003 paper, was to decompose occupations into tasks and classify tasks by their susceptibility to computerization. The task-based framework explained with devastating precision the pattern economists had struggled to characterize: the hollowing of the middle, simultaneous growth at the top and bottom of the wage distribution as routine tasks in the middle were automated away. The framework also identified what it thought was the line machines could not