The Man Who Made Us See That Trade Isn't Always Free

Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor once referred to himself as an “ambulance chaser.” It was his self-deprecating way of admitting that his work tends to focus on the really big, urgent issues facing the modern economy.

Autor is one of the leaders of the empirical revolution in economics. Along with others like Stanford’s Raj Chetty and Harvard’s Lawrence Katz, Autor has been pioneering ways to make the economics discipline both more credible and more relevant. He has tackled subjects like monopoly power and the polarization of the job market. But perhaps his biggest bombshell has been his finding, along with co-authors David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, that opening the U.S. economy to trade with China hurt American workers a lot more than had previously been thought. Though that finding has been challenged by others such as George Washington University’s Jonathan Rothwell, it has already changed the way economists think and talk about the costs and benefits of free trade.