Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

A distinctive
feature of social and
cultural life at CMC

 

The Great Reshaping: How Chinese Trade Changed America's Workers and Communities

Thu, February 27, 2025
Dinner Program
David Autor

When China's exports to America surged in the 2000s, it transformed local economies and individual lives across the U.S. David Autor, professor of economics at MIT, will reveal surprising findings about how communities bounced back from this economic shock. While affected areas eventually regained their total employment levels, the recovery came through an unexpected source—not from displaced manufacturing workers finding new jobs, but from a new generation of workers, including young Hispanic Americans, immigrants, women, and college graduates. These newcomers built careers in healthcare, education, and services, fundamentally altering the demographic and economic fabric of these communities. Drawing on two decades of comprehensive data, Autor will explore why this transformation challenges conventional wisdom about economic adaptation and what it tells us about the future of American labor markets.

David Autor is the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, co-director of the NBER Labor Studies Program and the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative. His scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes.

The Economist magazine labeled Autor in 2019 as “The academic voice of the American worker.” Later that same year, and with equal justification, he was christened “Twerpy MIT Economist” by John Oliver of Last Week Tonight in a segment on automation and employment.

Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship—the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of Labor Economics, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2019, the Society for Progress Medal in 2021—and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship. In 2020, Autor received the Heinz 25th Special Recognition Award from the Heinz Family Foundation for his work “transforming our understanding of how globalization and technological change are impacting jobs and earning prospects for American workers.” In 2023, Autor was selected as one of two researchers across all scientific fields a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist.

Professor Autor will deliver the 2025 McKenna Lecture on International Trade and Economics.

Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum

Claremont McKenna College
385 E. Eighth Street
Claremont, CA 91711

Contact

Phone: (909) 621-8244 
Fax: (909) 621-8579 
Email: