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workforce altogether. The downward mobility of these workers, meanwhile, has made life harder for high-school dropouts and others who’ve traditionally occupied the lowest rung of the jobs ladder, and who’ve fallen off it in large numbers since the recession began.
    “I think [a middle-class life] is gone forever for a lot of people,” said John Foss to the journalist Michael Luo in February 2009. Foss, a former stockroom clerk, had lost his job at Manchester Tool Company in New Franklin, Ohio, when its only plant had closed a year earlier. (The company’s owner, Kennametal, was consolidating operations to improve efficiency.) Along with 85 percent of the plant’s hourly workers, he’d been unable to find work since, and was searching for jobs in the $8- to $12-an-hour range, well below his previous wage of about $18 an hour. About a third of the plant’s salaried workers—including engineers and accountants—had been asked by Kennametal to stay on, and salaried employees in general had faredbetter than their hourly coworkers after the plant’s closure. As of December 2010, Foss was still jobless.
    The recession has only sped the societal re-sorting that was already in motion. Both trade and technology have been quickly increasing the number of low-cost substitutes for American workers with only moderate cognitive or manual skills—people who perform routine tasks such as product assembly, process monitoring, record keeping, basic information brokering, simple software coding, and so on. As machines and low-paid foreign workers have taken on these functions, the skills associated with them have become less valuable, and workers lacking higher education have suffered.
    For the most part, these same forces have been a boon, so far, to Americans who have a good education and exceptional creative talents or analytic skills. Information technology has complemented the work of people who do complex research, sophisticated analysis, professional persuasion, and many forms of design and artistic creation, rather than replacing that work. And global integration has meant wider markets for new American products and high-value services—and higher incomes for the people who create or provide them.
    The return on education has risen in recent decades, producing more-severe income stratification by educational attainment. But even among the meritocratic elite, the economy’s evolution has produced a startling divergence. Since 1993,
more than half
of the nation’s income growth has been captured by the top 1 percent of earners, families who in 2008 made $368,000 or more. And in fact, incomes among the top 0.1 percent have grown even faster. Nearly 2 million people matriculated to college in 2002—1,630 of them to Harvard—but only Mark Zuckerberg is worth many billions of dollars today;the rise of the super-elite is not a product of educational differences. In part, it is a natural outcome of widening markets and technological revolution—a result that’s not even close to being fully played out, and one reinforced strongly by the political influence that great wealth brings.
    Recently, as technology has improved and emerging-markets countries have sent more people to college, economic pressures have been moving up the educational ladder in the United States. “It’s useful to make a distinction between college and post-college,” Autor told me. “Among people with professional and even doctoral [degrees], in general the job market has been very good for a very long time, including recently. The group of highly educated individuals who have not done so well recently would be people who have a four-year college degree but nothing beyond that. Opportunities have been less good, wage growth has been less good, the recession has been more damaging. They’ve been displaced from mid-managerial or organizational positions where they don’t have extremely specialized, hard-to-find skills.”
    College graduates may be