See Our Chicago Minds in Action: Profile of Professor Erik Hurst

Erik Hurst:
I grew up, I would say, lower middle class. My father was a manufacturer. My mom had less than a high school education. Then automation came and affected their lives. So the labor market is something I just grew up thinking about. I care about the middle class getting eroded and how we as scientists could help policymakers make that middle class stronger. That's what keeps me going.

For University of Chicago, economics is kind of at the forefront of the world. I teach a macroeconomics class, and so I always like to tell my students, I'm preparing them not for their first job, but for their last job. As you move up the chain of command in your industry, you have more and more access to influencing decisions. New technologies come in, replace old technologies in society advances. We always want to be teaching how to think as opposed to what to think.

It's going to be even more important as we come forward with these new technologies that are coming along, like AI today. It's important for us as scientists to realize that our work is incremental, that each day we're trying to add a little brick in the wall. We spend a lot of our time here at great institutions like the University of Chicago creating cutting-edge research. We're just trying to build walls of knowledge to leave to future generations.