How technology helps hollow out the middle class

Ever wonder where all those middle class, mid-manager jobs went? Daniel Markovits in the indispensable book, The Meritocracy Trap, explains how technological improvements and increasing domination of a highly-educated, wealthy management class has made a bedrock of postwar employment redundant.

Over the past half century, new technologies have collectively changed how goods and services are produced and, along the way, fundamentally transfigured the nature of work and the market for workers. Innovations, large and small, collectively shape which jobs exist: what tasks p production requires and how tasks are arranged into the bundles called jobs, to be performed by a single person. Technological developments also influence the number of openings available for each type of job and therefore what wages workers receive for doing these various tasks.

A pattern emerges out of the cases. The rising technological tide has not lifted all boats equally, nor even lifted all boats at all. Instead, in sector after sector, technological innovation has shifted the center of economic production away from the middle of the skill distribution and toward the distribution's tails.

On the one hand, new technologies substitute for mid-skilled human workers and eliminate the middle-class jobs that dominated the mid century economy. On the other, new technologies complement both unskilled and especially super-skilled workers and increase the demand for both the least and especially the most skilled workers, creating the many gloomy and few glossy jobs that dominate production today.

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Photo taken by Ken Lund.