Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career

by Scott H. Young

It’s well known that income inequality has been increasing in the United States over the last several decades. However, this description ignores a more subtle picture. The MIT economist David Autor has shown that instead of inequality rising across the board, there are actually two different effects: inequality rising at the top and lowering at the bottom.2 This matches Cowen’s thesis of average being over, with the middle part of the income spectrum being compressed into the bottom and stretched out at the top. Autor identifies the role that technology has had in creating this effect. The advance of computerization and automation technologies has meant that many medium-skilled jobs—clerks, travel agents, bookkeepers, and factory workers—have been replaced with new technologies. New jobs have arisen in their place, but those jobs are often one of two types: either they are high-skilled jobs, such as engineers, programmers, managers, and designers, or they are lower-skilled jobs such as retail workers, cleaners, or customer service agents.

You are ignoring the MASSIVE increase in passive wealth accumulation by people who do literally nothing to earn it. You are ignoring stagnating wages, destruction of pension plans, skyrocketing costs of higher education, and requirement inflation that suddenly turned shopkeeping and secretarial work into jobs that require BAs. The issue isnt technology, its a system that views people as expendable