Morning Must-Read: Lawrence Mishel: Broadening Agreement That Job Polarization Wasn’t Present in the United States In 2000s

Lawrence Mishel: Broadening Agreement That Job Polarization Wasn’t Present in the United States In 2000s: “The ‘job polarization hypotheses’…

claim[s] that computerization leads to the ‘simultaneous growth of high-education, high-wage and low-education, low-wages jobs at the expense of middle-wage, middle education jobs’…. It is noteworthy, therefore, that MIT Professor David Autor, the leading intellectual architect of the job polarization hypothesis, has presented a paper at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s economic policy symposium in Jackson Hole, Wyo., which finds that job polarization did not occur in the 2000s and that, in any case, job polarization is not necessarily connected to wage polarization. This confirms the findings of others, such as Beaudry, Green, and Sand and my own research with Heidi Shierholz and John Schmitt. One can only applaud Autor for updating his analysis of employment and wage trends, and acknowledging the lack of occupational job polarization in the 2000s and its failure to be able to explain wage trends…. In the new paper, Autor directly acknowledges the failure of occupational employment patterns to predict wage patterns, something he did not do in his earlier work, writing that ‘while computerization has strongly contributed to employment polarization, we would not generally expect these employment changes to culminate in wage polarization except in tight labor markets.’… In the end, changes in occupational employment patterns are a dim flashlight indeed for shining light on key wage patterns…