You understand people. You can read a room. Why would anyone pay you for that?

In the final part of his series on work in the age of superintelligent AI, David Deming - labor economist and Dean of Harvard College - explains why social skills create economic value. Specialization makes the modern economy productive, but its gains depend on coordination, and coordination is costly: meetings, handoffs, misunderstandings, work that melts away between people. People with strong social skills reduce the melt, and the same skill that makes a good teammate makes a good manager.

David shares new evidence that managerial skill is real, measurable, and seriously underpriced: managers selected for economic decision-making skill raise team performance, store sales, and profits, while the people most eager to be in charge perform worse than managers chosen by lottery. In one retail chain, a good manager was worth $180,000 to $240,000 a year in added profit. And the skill of leading human teams turns out to be nearly identical to the skill of leading AI agents.

Then the million-dollar question: even if humans keep working, will the work pay? David explains why the bleakest wage forecasts rest on a fragile assumption, and why, in an O-ring economy, automating most of the production chain can make the remaining human bottleneck - trust, judgment, the ability to make the sale - the most valuable link of all.

Try the assignment game: https://skillslab.dev

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