soar to $1 billion. However, the wealth of the median customer, the one exactly in the middle of the distribution, wouldn’t change at all.

Ever-greater investments in education, dramatically increasing the average educational level of the American workforce, helped prevent inequality from soaring as technology automated more and more unskilled work. While education is certainly not synonymous with skill, it is one of the most easily measurable correlates of skill, so this pattern

come—namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

If 50 construction workers are drinking at a bar and Bill Gates walks in as the poorest customer walks out, the mean wealth of the customers would

Why has the scourge of unemployment been so persistent? Analysts offer three alternative explanations: cyclicality, stagnation, and the “end of work.”

advanced pattern recognition and complex communication, for now humans still hold the high ground in each of these areas. Experienced doctors, for example, make diagnoses by comparing the body of medical knowledge they’ve accumulated against patients’ lab results and descriptions of symptoms, and also by employing the advanced subconscious pattern

The median worker is losing the race against the machine.

We’ll start with skill-biased technical change, which is perhaps the most carefully studied of the three phenomena. This is technical change that increases the relative demand for high-skill labor while reducing or eliminating the demand for low-skill labor.

They think it’s because the pace of technological innovation has slowed down. We think it’s because the pace has sped up so much that it’s left a lot of people behind. Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine.