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posted by cmn32480 on Monday August 24 2015, @04:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the but-i-like-being-a-d-head dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by pnkwarhall on Monday August 24 2015, @09:08PM

    by pnkwarhall (4558) on Monday August 24 2015, @09:08PM (#227240)

    Obviously if you permanently destroy non-BS jobs, the percentage of BS jobs will increase over time.

    This is not obvious to the average citizen. I agree with you 100%, but look at all the political rhetoric about "creating jobs". Then there's the old adage that "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.' I have been surprised to find that, for many people, what they do is not as important to them as what they get out of what they do (generally, although not exclusively, financial compensation).

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