Work is what structures adults' lives: it gives us purpose, focus, a set of responsibilities, and an identity. So when people are not participating in the labour market, all sorts of other things often start to go wrong.
Interpretation
Work provides adults with a sense of purpose and identity, and its absence can lead to various issues.
In this quote, David Autor emphasizes the fundamental role that work plays in the lives of adults. Beyond simply earning a living, work structures our daily routines, provides a sense of purpose, and contributes to our identity. When individuals are disconnected from the workforce, they may experience a loss of direction and responsibility, which can trigger a cascade of negative outcomes in their lives.
In practice
In a speech about employment, one might quote this to highlight the importance of work in society.
The fact that a task cannot be computerized does not imply that computerization has no effect on that task. On the contrary, tasks that cannot be substituted by computerization are generally complemented by it. This point is as fundamental as it is overlooked.
Our machines increasingly do our work for us. Why doesn't this make our labor redundant and our skills obsolete? Why are there still so many jobs?
There's always new work to do. Adjusting to the rapid pace of technological change creates real challenges, seen most clearly in our polarized labor market and the threat that it poses to economic mobility. Rising to this challenge is not automatic. It's not costless. It's not easy. But it is feasible.
That's the great irony of allowing passionate people to work from home. A manager's natural instinct is to worry that her workers aren't getting enough work done. But the real threat is that they will wind up working too hard. And because the manager isn't sitting across from her worker anymore, she can't look in the person's eyes and see burnout.
Some 80% of your life is spent working. You want to have fun at home; why shouldn't you have fun at work?
It is right and necessary that all should have work to do which shall be worth doing and be of itself pleasant to do, and which should be done under such conditions as would make it neither over-wearisome nor over-anxious.
Work is work; wherever I'm working, I do the best I can. If the actual dollars come from investors as opposed to taxpayers and patrons, what's the difference?
My feeling about work is it's much more about the experience of doing it than the end product. Sometimes things that are really great and make lots of money are miserable to make, and vice versa.
I get to go to work and come home with something interesting or enriching or astonishing.
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