question : summarise in your own words the following in about 350 words: This article presents evidence of growing demand for social skills over the past several decades. What explains the growing importance of social skills in the labor market? One reason is that computers are still very poor at simulating human interaction. Reading the signals of others and reacting is an unconscious process, and skill in social settings has evolved in humans over thousands of years. Human interaction in the workplace involves team production, with workers playing off of each other’s strengths and adapting flexibly to changing circumstances. Such nonroutine interaction is at the heart of the human advantage over machines. I formalize the importance of social skills with a model of team production in the workplace. Because workers naturally vary in their ability to perform the great variety of workplace tasks, teamwork increases productivity through comparative advantage. I model social skills as reducing the worker-specific cost of coordination or trading tasks with others. Workers with high social skills can trade tasks at a lower cost, enabling them to work with others more efficiently. The model generates intuitive predictions about sorting and the relative returns to skills across occupations, which I investigate using two panel surveys, the NLSY79 and NLSY97, that contain comparable measures of worker skills and repeated observations of occupational choice and wages. I find that the wage return to social skills is positive even after conditioning on cognitive skill, noncognitive skill, and a wide variety of other covariates, and that cognitive skill and social skill are complements. I also find that workers with higher social skills are more likely to work in social skill–intensive occupations, and that they earn a relatively higher wage return when they sort into these occupations. I show evidence of strong relative employment and wage growth for social skill–intensive occupations between 1980 and 2012. Jobs that require high levels of cognitive skill and social skill have fared particularly well, while high math, low social skill jobs (including many STEM occupations) have fared especially poorly. I also study changes in the returns to social skill between the NLSY79 and NLSY97, using nearly identical measures of skills and other covariates across survey waves. I find that social skills were a much stronger predictor of employment and wages for young adults age 25 to 33 in the mid-2000s, compared to the 1980s and 1990s. In contrast, the importance of cognitive skills has declined modestly. This article argues for the importance of social skills, yet it is silent about where social skills come from and whether they can be affected by education or public policy. A robust finding in the literature on early childhood interventions is that long-run impacts on adult outcomes can persist can even when short-run impacts on test scores “fade out” (e.g., Deming 2009; Chetty et al. 2011). It is possible that increases in social skills are a key mechanism for long-run impacts of early childhood interventions. Heckman, Pinto, and Savelyev (2013) find that the long-run impacts of the Perry Preschool project on employment, earnings and criminal activity were mediated primarily by program-induced increases in social skills. The Perry Preschool curriculum placed special emphasis on developing children’s skills in cooperation, resolution of interpersonal conflicts, and self-control. Recent longitudinal studies have found strong correlations between a measure of socioemotional skills in kindergarten and important young adult outcomes such as employment, earnings, health, and criminal activity (Dodge et al. 2014; Jones, Greenberg, and Crowley 2015). If social skills are learned early in life, not expressed in academic outcomes such as reading and math achievement, but important for adult outcomes such as employment and earnings, this would generate the fade-out pattern that is commonly observed for early life interventions. Indeed, preschool classrooms focus much more on the development of social and emotional skills than elementary school classrooms, which emphasize “hard” academic skills such as literacy and mathematics. Still, these conclusions are clearly speculative, and the impact of social skill development on adult labor market outcomes is an important question for future work.
question : summarise in your own words the following in about 350 words:
This article presents evidence of growing demand for social skills over the past several decades. What explains the growing importance of social skills in the labor market? One reason is that computers are still very poor at simulating human interaction. Reading the signals of others and reacting is an unconscious process, and skill in social settings has evolved in humans over thousands of years. Human interaction in the workplace involves team production, with workers playing off of each other’s strengths and adapting flexibly to changing circumstances. Such nonroutine interaction is at the heart of the human advantage over machines. I formalize the importance of social skills with a model of team production in the workplace. Because workers naturally vary in their ability to perform the great variety of workplace
tasks, teamwork increases productivity through
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