The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market
by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane · 11 Apr 2004 · 187pp · 55,801 words
This page intentionally left blank How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane RUSSELL SAGE FOUNDATION New York PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Princeton and Oxford Copyright © 2004 by Russell Sage Foundation Requests for permission to
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: 0-691-12402-7 The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition of this book as follows Levy, Frank, 1941– The new division of labor : how computers are creating the next job market / Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane. p. cm. ISBN 0-691-11972-4 (cl. : alk. paper) 1. Labor supply—Effect of technological innovations
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Tim Sullivan, and Suzanne Nichols of the Russell Sage Foundation for pushing us to clarify the book’s message and shepherding the manuscript to publication. Richard Murnane’s secretary, Wendy Angus, patiently kept track of the multiple versions of chapters and made sure that the right versions were sent to readers and
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1999 Figure 3.5. Economy-Wide Measures of Routine and Non-Routine Task Input: 1969–98 (1969 0). Revised version of figure from David Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard J. Murnane, “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (November 2003): 4. decades. The pattern
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(left bars) and Predicted Changes in Task Frequency Had There Been No Increase in Computer Use (right bars). Revised version of figure from David Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard J. Murnane, “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118 (November 2003): 4. The answer is
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on discussions with our colleague David Autor of MIT’s Department of Economics. Some of the chapter’s arguments first appeared in David H. Autor, Frank Levy, and Richard J. Murnane, “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 4 (November 2003): 1279–1333
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by the bank and the number of employees in exceptions processing. 18. For a detailed description of the Cabot Bank case, see David H. Autor, Frank Levy, 164 NOTES TO CHAPTER 5 and Richard J. Murnane, “Upstairs, Downstairs: Computers and Skills on Two Floors of a Large Bank,” Industrial and Labor Relations
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B. Resnick, including “Literacy in School and Out,” Daedalus 119, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 169– 85. 5. See Richard J. Murnane, John B. Willett, and Frank Levy, “The Growing Importance of Cognitive Skills in Wage Determination,” Review of Economics and Statistics 77, no. 2 (1995): 251–66. 6. See, for example, the
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Ann Zehr, “Computer Giants Look to Students,” Education Week 17, no. 31 (April 15, 1998). 4. For the details of this story, see Richard Murnane, Nancy Sharkey, and Frank Levy, “A Role for the Internet in American Education? Lessons from Cisco Networking Academies,” in The Knowledge Economy and Postsecondary Education, ed. Patricia Albjerg Graham
Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton · 30 Sep 2010 · 543pp · 147,357 words
-What-I-Hold Society 1 Cabinet Office (2009) Unleashing Aspiration: The Final Report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, HMSO. 2 Frank Levy and Richard Murnane (2004) The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, Princeton University Press. See also Maarten Goos and Alan Manning (2007) ‘Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The
The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey · 17 Jun 2019 · 626pp · 167,836 words
words, suggest that they are faced with fewer alternative job options for which their skills are suitable. Together with Autor, in their pioneering 2004 book, The New Division of Labor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, two economists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, were among the first to note this pattern: As computers have helped channel economic growth, two
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that emerge “when clutches of stones surround empty spaces.”3 As discussed above, humans still held the comparative advantage in pattern recognition when Frank Levy and Richard Murnane published their brilliant book The New Division of Labor in 2004.4 At the time, computers were nowhere near capable of challenging the human brain in identifying patterns. But now they
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Ford highlights surely involve some tasks that can be automated away, they also involve many more tasks that cannot. For example, when Dana Remus and Frank Levy recently analyzed lawyers’ billing records, they found that if AI and several related applications were all adopted immediately—which seems highly unlikely—this would substitute
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has read many different versions of this manuscript, for which I’m enormously thankful. I’m also grateful to Ian Goldin, Logan Graham, Jane Humphries, Frank Levy, Jonas Ljungberg, Joel Mokyr, Michael Osborne, and Anil Prashar for reading all or part of this manuscript and providing invaluable comments. Above all, my family
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. D. A. Grier, 2005, When Humans Were Computers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 3. On mortgage underwriters, see F. Levy and R. J. Murnane, 2004, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 17–19. 4. H. Braverman, 1998, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation
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, “Lousy and Lovely Jobs: The Rising Polarization of Work in Britain,” Review of Economics and Statistics 89 (1): 118–33. 7. Levy and Murnane, 2004, The New Division of Labor, 3. 8. W. D. Nordhaus, 2007, “Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing,” Journal of Economic History 67 (1): 128–59. 9. J. S. Tompkins
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20 Articles about Technological Change, from the Monthly Labor Review (Washington: Bureau of Labor Statistics), 94. 14. Ibid. 15. Quoted in Levy and Murnane, 2004, The New Division of Labor, 4. 16. Quoted in ibid. 17. D. H. Autor, 2015, “Polanyi’s Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth,” in Re-evaluating Labor Market Dynamics
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other tasks more valuable (1993, “The O-Ring Theory of Economic Development,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108 [3]: 551–75). 20. Levy and Murnane, 2004, The New Division of Labor, 13–14. 21. R. Reich, 1991, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for Twenty-First Century Capitalism (New York: Knopf). 22. E. L. Glaeser, 2013
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. H. Autor and Dorn, 2013, “The Growth of Low-Skill Service Jobs and the Polarization of the US Labor Market”). 25. Levy and Murnane, 2004, The New Division of Labor, 3. See also D. H. Autor, F. Levy, and R. J. Murnane, 2003, “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration,” Quarterly Journal
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–75. 3. C. Koch, 2016, “How the Computer Beat the Go Master,” Scientific American 27 (4): 20. 4. F. Levy and R. J. Murnane, 2004, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). 5. E. Brynjolfsson and A. McAfee, 2014, The Second Machine Age: Work
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: Artificial Intelligence, Jobs, and Politics in the Near Term.” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 34 (3): 393–417. Levy, F., and R. J. Murnane. 2004. The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lewis, D. L. 1986. “The Automobile in America: The Industry.” Wilson Quarterly
Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri · 6 May 2019 · 346pp · 97,330 words
engineers and businesses looked to automate productivity, they generated a demand for people to step in, for an indeterminate stretch, to do what economist Frank Levy and computer scientist Richard Murnane refer to as the “expert thinking” and “complex communication” required to make services work, as promised.41 Caught in the paradox of automation
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Vesselina Ratcheva. The Future of Jobs: Employment, Skills and Workforce Strategy for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum, 2016. Levy, Frank, and Richard Murnane. The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Li, Fei-Fei. “ImageNet: Where Have We Been? Where Are We
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the human ability to manage and solve analytical problems and communicate new information, so it keeps expert thinking and complex communication in strong demand.” See Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). [back] 42. Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart
The Fissured Workplace
by David Weil · 17 Feb 2014 · 518pp · 147,036 words
(forthcoming). Appelbaum, Eileen, and Rose Batt. 2012. “A Primer on Private Equity at Work.” Challenge 55, no. 5: 5–38. Appelbaum, Eileen, Annette Bernhardt, and Richard Murnane, eds. 2003. Low Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Arlen, Jennifer, and W. Bentley MacLeod. 2005
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and Specialization: The Growth of Low-Skilled Service Employment in the United States.” Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 15150. Autor, David, Frank Levy, and Richard J. Murnane. 2003. “The Skill Content of Recent Technological Change: An Empirical Exploration.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 116, no. 4: 1449–1492. Baker
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Auto Suppliers, Hospitals, and Public Schools.” In Low Wage America: How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace, edited by Eileen Appelbaum, Annette Bernhardt, and Richard Murnane. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 368–406. Erickson, Chris, and Daniel Mitchell. 2007. “Monopsony as a Metaphor for the Emerging Post-union Labor Market.” International
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in America. New York: Hill and Wang. Levitt, Peggy. 2001. The Transnational Villagers. Berkeley: University of California Press. Levy, Frank, and Richard J. Murnane. 2005. The New Division of Labor. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lewis, Michael. 2009. Panic! The Story of Modern Financial Insanity. New York: W. W. Norton. ______. 2010. The Big Short: Inside
The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl · 4 Nov 2014 · 268pp · 75,850 words
. It is for this reason that it is dangerous to bet against a bot. A decade ago, respected MIT and Harvard economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane published a well-researched book entitled The New Division of Labor, in which they compared the respective capabilities of human workers and computers. In an optimistic second chapter called “Why People Still
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. Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012). 6 Levy, Frank, and Richard Murnane. The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 7 Stone, Brad. The Everything
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee · 20 Jan 2014 · 339pp · 88,732 words
conclusion, and how technologies like Chauffeur started to overturn it in just a few years, offers important lessons about digital progress. In 2004 Frank Levy and Richard Murnane published their book The New Division of Labor.1 The division they focused on was between human and digital labor—in other words, between people and computers. In any sensible economic
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harder to digitize than what human computers used to do? Computers Are Good at Following Rules . . . These are the questions Levy and Murnane tackled in The New Division of Labor, and the answers they came up with made a great deal of sense. The authors put information processing tasks—the foundation of all knowledge work
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easily substitute for humans in [jobs like driving]. So Much for That Distinction We were convinced by Levy and Murnane’s arguments when we read The New Division of Labor in 2004. We were further convinced that year by the initial results of the DARPA Grand Challenge for driverless cars. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research
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and Smooth Talkers In addition to pattern recognition, Levy and Murnane highlight complex communication as a domain that would stay on the human side in the new division of labor. They write that, “Conversations critical to effective teaching, managing, selling, and many other occupations require the transfer and interpretation of a broad range of information
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has been to decrease demand for less skilled labor while increasing the demand for skilled labor. Economists including David Autor, Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane, Daron Acemoglu, and many others have documented this trend in dozens of careful studies.17 They call it skill-biased technical change. By definition
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abilities, if any, will still be valued as technology continues to improve. Recent history shows that this is a difficult question to answer. Frank Levy and Richard Murnane’s excellent book The New Division of Labor was by far the best research and thinking on this topic when it came out in 2004, arguing that pattern recognition and complex
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former group Susan Athey, David Autor, Zoe Baird, Nick Bloom, Tyler Cowen, Charles Fadel, Chrystia Freeland, Robert Gordon, Tom Kalil, Larry Katz, Tom Kochan, Frank Levy, James Manyika, Richard Murnane, Robert Putnam, Paul Romer, Scott Stern, Larry Summers, and Hal Varian have helped our thinking enormously. In the latter category are Chris Anderson, Rod
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to convey them in this book. Some members of both groups came together at an extraordinary series of lunches at MIT organized by John Leonard, Frank Levy, Daniela Rus, and Seth Teller that assembled people from the Economics Department, the Sloan School of Management, and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab
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the Real State of the World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 165. Chapter 2 THE SKILLS OF THE NEW MACHINES 1. Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 2. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Chicago, IL: University
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.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html. 5. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: HarperCollins, 2012), p. 72. 6. Levy and Murnane, The New Division of Labor, p. 29. 7. “Siri Is Actually Incredibly Useful Now,” Gizmodo, accessed August 4, 2013, http://gizmodo.com/5917461/siri-is-better-now. 8. Ibid. 9
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Changed the Labor Market?,” Working Paper (National Bureau of Economic Research, March 1997), http://www.nber.org/papers/w5956; F. Levy and R. J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); D. Autor, “The Polarization of Job Opportunities in the U.S
The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr · 28 Sep 2014 · 308pp · 84,713 words
of automation. Computers could do a lot of things, but they couldn’t do everything. In an influential 2004 book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane argued, convincingly, that there were practical limits to the ability of software programmers to replicate human talents, particularly those involving
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to Build Self-Driving Cars,” Financial Times, September 17, 2013, ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/70d26288-1faf-11e3-8861-00144feab7de.html. 4.Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 20. 5.Tom A. Schweizer et al., “Brain Activity during
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, 221. Chapter Four: THE DEGENERATION EFFECT 1.Alfred North Whitehead, An Introduction to Mathematics (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), 61. 2.Quoted in Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 4. 3.Raja Parasuraman et al., “Model for Types and
The Great Divergence: America's Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It
by Timothy Noah · 23 Apr 2012 · 309pp · 91,581 words
part.6 For example, someone had to be employed to make these new machines. But as the economists Frank Levy of MIT and Richard J. Murnane of Harvard point out in their 2004 book The New Division of Labor, computers represented an entirely different sort of new machine. Previously, technology had performed physical tasks. (Think of John
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exactly the same as, jobs requiring “rule-based logic,” which, as noted in the previous chapter, are the jobs that the MIT economist Frank Levy and the Harvard economist Richard Murnane deem most vulnerable to automation. But impersonally delivered services include a lot more high-skill jobs (though they include lots of low-skill
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have fallen on deaf ears. Similar demands from the affluent might not. Indeed, to some extent they’ve already been heeded. American radiologists, MIT’s Frank Levy and Kyoung-Hee Yu of the Australian School of Business note in a 2006 paper, have managed to keep a pretty tight regulatory lid on
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economists and political scientists have suggested looking at the question differently. Rather than consider only taxes and benefits, they recommend looking at what MIT’s Frank Levy and Peter Temin call “institutions and norms.” It’s a vague phrase, but in practice what it mostly means is “stuff the government did, or
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Bertrand, Ron Blackwell, Francine Blau, George Borjas, Gary Burtless, Larry Bartels, Joseph Ferrie, Richard Freeman, Claudia Goldin, Harry Holzer, Christopher Jencks, Lawrence Katz, Paul Krugman, Frank Levy, Emmanuel Saez, Isabel Sawhill, Jeffrey Williamson, and Scott Winship. Thanks also to the non-academics who talked to me about their own lives and work
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.php?page=october-28-1980-debate-transcript. 29. Goldin and Katz, Education and Technology, 52; WTID. 30. Interview with Paul Krugman, Aug. 28, 2010. 31. Frank Levy and Peter Temin, “Inequality and Institutions in 20th Century America,” Industrial Performance Center MIT Working Paper Series (Cambridge, MA, 2007), 5. Levy and Temin derived
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Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1999; originally published in 1973), 463. 8. Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 13–25; and Farhad Manjoo, “Will Robots Steal Your
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Education and the Workforce, 2011), 14; Lawrence Katz and Claudia Goldin, interview with author, June 8, 2010. 29. Goldin and Katz, Education and Technology, 290; Frank Levy and Tom Kochan, “Addressing the Problem of Stagnant Wages” (Champaign, IL: Employment Policy Research Network, March 17, 2011), 2, at http://www.employmentpolicy.org/topic
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Growth: Policy Lessons from Bangalore, India” (Luxembourg: Joint Research Centre/Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, 2011), 7. 25. Blinder, “How Many U.S. Jobs.” 26. Frank Levy and Kyoung-Hee Yu, “Offshoring Radiology Serivces to India,” Working Paper 06–005 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Industrial Performance Center, 2006), 17–19. 27. Dean Baker
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a deliberate policy by the Nixon administration to reduce domestic agricultural production (and thereby increase food prices) to court the farm vote in 1972. 9. Frank Levy, interview with author, Apr. 22, 2011. 10. The disruptive oil shocks of the 1970s—in 1973 and 1974 alone oil prices quadrupled—likely played a
Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy
by Erik Brynjolfsson · 23 Jan 2012 · 72pp · 21,361 words
have taken us by surprise comes from comparing a carefully researched book published in 2004 with an announcement made in 2010. The book is The New Division of Labor by economists Frank Levy and Richard Murnane. As its title implies, it’s a description of the comparative capabilities of computers and human workers. In the book’s second chapter
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, computers are good at following rules. At the other end of the complexity spectrum are pattern-recognition tasks where the rules can’t be inferred. The New Division of Labor gives driving in traffic as an example of this type of task, and asserts that it is not automatable: The … truck driver is processing a
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.5 that wage divergence accelerated in the digital era. As documented in careful studies by David Autor, Lawrence Katz, and Alan Krueger, as well as Frank Levy and Richard Murnane and many others, the increase in the relative demand for skilled labor is closely correlated with advances in technology, particularly digital technologies. Hence, the
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Jonathan Sidi did the same for Erik. We are grateful for conversations on technology and employment with our MIT colleagues, including Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, Frank Levy, Tod Loofbourrow, Thomas Malone, Stuart Madnick, Wanda Orlikowski, Michael Schrage, Peter Weill, and Irving Wladawsky-Berger. In addition, Rob Atkinson, Yannis Bakos, Susanto Basu, Menzie
Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines
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The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age
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