The NBER (National Bureau of Economic Research) has published a new paper examining the increasing requirement for social skills in modern labor markets. Reinforcing some of the lessons of another recent story here on Soylent, the abstract is as follows:
The slow growth of high-paying jobs in the U.S. since 2000 and rapid advances in computer technology have sparked fears that human labor will eventually be rendered obsolete. Yet while computers perform cognitive tasks of rapidly increasing complexity, simple human interaction has proven difficult to automate. In this paper, I show that the labor market increasingly rewards social skills. Since 1980, jobs with high social skill requirements have experienced greater relative growth throughout the wage distribution. Moreover, employment and wage growth has been strongest in jobs that require high levels of both cognitive skill and social skill. To understand these patterns, I develop a model of team production where workers "trade tasks" to exploit their comparative advantage. In the model, social skills reduce coordination costs, allowing workers to specialize and trade more efficiently. The model generates predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skill across occupations, which I test and confirm using data from the NLSY79. The female advantage in social skills may have played some role in the narrowing of gender gaps in labor market outcomes since 1980.
A paywall-free version of the paper is available here.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hemocyanin on Monday August 24 2015, @05:34AM
Funny you say that. I was out with some friends boating yesterday, got bored, and really wished that I could be at home messing around in the garage (no basement) rather than listening to the inane astrology bunk of a friend of a friend. I did not engage. I took a nap instead.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday August 24 2015, @06:19AM
Strategic social abstention is a social skill right?
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