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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.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @06:26AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 25 2015, @06:26AM (#227427)

    > I don't see anything new here. Boot-lickers and ass-suckers have always risen to the top. Shit floats, after all.

    Which explains why, at +5, your post is the highest rated of all posts for this story.