The author mainly derives the concepts and ideas mainly from his own previous essays, articles etc.
I. “Acemoglu, Daron, David H. Autor, David Dorn, Gordon Hanson, and Brendan Price. Forthcoming. “Import Competition and the Great U.S. Employment Saga of the 2000s.” Journal of Labour Economics.
II. Autor, David H. 2013. “The ‘Task Approach’ to Labour Markets: An Overview.” Journal for Labour Market Research 46(3): 185–99.
III. Autor, David H. 2014. “Skills, Education, and the Rise of Earnings Inequality among the ‘Other 99 Per cent.’” Science 344(6186): 843–51.
IV. Autor, David H. 2015. “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth.” In Re-Evaluating Labour Market Dynamics, pp. 129–79. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
V. Autor, David H. Forthcoming. “The Paradox of Abundance: Automation Anxiety Returns.” In Performance and Progress: Essays on Capitalism, Business and Society, edited by Subramanian Rangan. London: Oxford University Press.
VI. Autor, David H., and David Dorn. 2013. “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labour Market.” American Economic Review 103(5): 1553–97 “
These are few of works he cited in his essays and articles and in the references. These form the base of his arguments. From this and his own theoretical premises, he is trying to connect broad literature and theories on automation, social philosophy of Polanay's paradox to the theories of labour polarisation.
i. Theories of automation: Through the literature review of this particular aspect, which is an alarming phenomenon across the world, he finds out that the popular notion of automation as an evil is a bubble or myth than a reality. But he has never refused the impact of such panicking or automation anxiety. Few examples of the literature he reviewed to substantiate his point are,
I. “The National Commission on Technology, Automation, and Economic Progress: Volume I.” Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office.
II. Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee. 2014. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. TIME. 1961. “The Automation Jobless. “February 24. “
He argues that only routine tasks will be automated. Even though the humanisation of automated technology is taking place tremendously, it is difficult to modify the technology, by making it understand as we understand things. The biggest failure of technology comes from its actions which are solely oriented towards codes and patterns. The algorithms and artificial intelligence are getting better day by day. Like Virginia Eubanks argued, the technology is more grasping and improving its knowledge system on every second of data adding. But the question she raises is about 'automating inequality'? she gives plenty of examples of how machine algorithms or artificial intelligence is unable to discrete which one is a fraud and which one is genuine. The automation can detect 1000's of fraud cases in a fraction of seconds using data analysis, which a human will take one hour at best. The patterns emerging from a fraudulent account and a family with regular issues will be the same. It is the human discretion that solves the issue rather than ' red flagging ' the desperate needful people from poor sections of society (Eubanks, 2017). Autor argues that technology should not always be regarding substitution, it should be more about complementing the labour ().
ii. The social philosophy of Polanyi's paradox: This paradox is named after the philosopher, economist and scientist aka chemist Polanyi, whose valuable observation on the contradiction of human knowledge gathering and ability to express it. He observed in 1966, “We know more than we can tell” (Polanyi 1966; Autor 2015). "When we break an egg over the edge of a mixing bowl, identify a distinct species of birds based on a fleeting glimpse, write a persuasive paragraph, or develop a hypothesis to explain a poorly understood phenomenon, we are engaging in tasks that we only tacitly understand how to perform. Following Polanyi’s observation, the tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those demanding flexibility, judgment, and common sense—skills that we understand only tacitly". When we follow the logic of Polanyi, it suggests that high-level reasoning is going to be computerized whereas certain sensory motor skills attached to the manual jobs are not.
“Autor, David H. 2015. “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth.” In Re-Evaluating Labour Market Dynamics, pp. 129–79. Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.” The author already spent much time in understanding this paradox and its consequent phenomenon through another of his own book.
iii. Theories of polarisation as a consequence of what I have explained above, the Polanyi’s paradox leads to the polarisation of labour and polarisation of wages. The former stems from the automation of middle-skilled employment and people either focusing on high skilled empirical ones and lower skilled manual jobs. Autor explains that this polarisation will seize to exist in the immediate future. One of his argument is regarding how there is unemployment’s related to manual, low skilled ones and how their wages are increased after a short interval of deprivation. He also explains how abstract jobs are reduced into small circles after a prosperous period before the 1980s. He also points out to the empirical reality of how certain middle-class jobs survived the ‘onslaught (as it is perceived in the popular imagination) of automation. He assumes through his empirical analysis that these jobs like that of radiologist, nurse and other works were human sensibility is more important in decision making becomes a barrier to automation. This does not mean that these areas of employment have escaped from the grips of technology. In a different way, this section of work and its labour is complemented by technology rather than substitution. The pieces of literature that he referred to know about the process of polarisation and its impact are mentioned below;
I. “Kremer, Michael. 1993. “The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108(3): 551–75.
II. Foote, Christopher L., and Richard W. Ryan. 2014. “Labour-Market Polarization over the Business Cycle.” Public Policy Discussion Paper 12-8, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, April.
III. Goos, Maarten, and Alan Manning. 2003. “Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain.” Center for Economic Performance Discussion Papers DP0604, December
IV. Goos, Maarten, and Alan Manning. 2007. “Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain.” Review of Economics and Statistics 89(1): 118–33.
V. Autor, David H., Lawrence F. Katz, and Melissa S. Kearney. 2006. “The Polarization of the U.S. Labour Market.” American Economic Review 96(2): 189–94”.
