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nature and meaning of the period through which we are now living.
    O NE OF THE most salient features of severe downturns is that they tend to accelerate deep economic shifts that were already under way. Declining industries and companies fail, spurring workers and capital toward rising sectors; declining cities and regions shrink faster, leaving blight; workers whose roles have been partly usurped by technology are pushed out en masse and never asked to return.Some economists have argued that in one sense, periods like these do nations a service by clearing the way for new innovation, more-efficient production, and faster growth. Whether or not that’s true, they typically allow us to see, with rare and brutal clarity, exactly where society is heading—and what sorts of people and places it is leaving behind.
    Arguably the most important economic trend in the United States over the past couple of generations has been the ever-more-distinct sorting of Americans into winners and losers, and the slow hollowing of the middle class. For most of the aughts, that sorting was masked by the housing bubble, which allowed working-class and middle-class families to raise their standard of living despite income stagnation or downward job mobility. But the crash blew away that fig leaf. And the recession has pressed down hard on the vast class of Americans with moderate education and moderate skills.
    The rich and well educated, after experiencing a brief dip in their fortunes, are, for the most part, beginning to prosper again today. Much of the rest of America remains stuck in neutral or reverse. In perhaps the biggest picture, the Great Recession has exposed the United States as something that seems uncomfortably un-American: a two-speed society, with opportunities for some.
    “The Great Recession has quantitatively but not qualitatively changed the trend toward employment polarization” in the United States, wrote the MIT economist David Autor in a 2010 white paper. Job losses have been “far more severe in middle-skilled white- and blue-collar jobs than in either high-skill, white-collar jobs or in low-skill service occupations.” Indeed, from 2007 through 2009, total employment in professional, managerial, and highly skilled technical positions was essentially unchanged. Jobs in low-skill service occupations such as food preparation, personal care, and house cleaning were also fairly stable in aggregate. Overwhelmingly, the recession has destroyed the jobs in between. Almost one out of every twelve white-collar jobs in sales, administrative support, and nonmanagerial office work vanished in the first two years of the recession; oneout of every six blue-collar jobs in production, craft, repair, and machine operation did the same.
    Autor isolates the winnowing of middle-skill, middle-class jobs as one of several major labor-market developments that are profoundly reshaping U.S. society. The others are rising pay at the top of the socioeconomic pyramid, falling wages for the less educated, and “lagging labor market gains for males.”
    “All,” he writes, “predate the Great Recession. But the available data suggest that the Great Recession has reinforced these trends.”
    For more than thirty years, the American economy has been in the midst of a sea change, shifting from industry to services and information, and integrating itself far more tightly into a single global market for goods, labor, and capital. This transformation has felt disruptive all along. But the pace of the change has quickened since the turn of the millennium, and even more so since the crash. “Technology has changed the game in jobs,” former GE CEO Jack Welch told CNBC in 2009. “We had technology bumping around for years in the ’80s and ’90s, and [we were] trying to make it work. And now it’s working.” Companies have figured out how to harness exponential increases in computing power better and faster, and to do so habitually; they’ve