The Elasticity of Demand for Personal Services

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The supply of labor to those activities is potentially very elastic because there's almost no barrier to entry, people can do them and be productive really rapidly. So we have seen growth in personal services, but only in the 90s when labor markets were extremely tight. The actual implications for who earns what are mediated through the other general equilibrium forces that tend to benefit the high skilled.

David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the future of work and the role that automation and smart machines might play in the workforce. Autor stresses the importance of Michael Polanyi's insight that many of the things we know and understand cannot be easily written down or communicated. Those kinds of tacit knowledge will be difficult for smart machines to access and use. In addition, Autor argues that fundamentally, the gains from machine productivity will accrue to humans. The conversation closes with a discussion of the distributional implications of a world with a vastly larger role for smart machines.