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and graduate degrees but is unfavorable to the particularly less-educated males.” This trend is called “employment polarization,” or skill-biased technological change. It means that a computer or a robot makes an educated person more productive and able to sell his or her goods and services in more markets around the world, but often makes a less-educated person less employable. When globalization and IT converge, the best-educated workers get raises and the least-educated get pink slips—or don’t get jobs in the first place. Tom’s New York Times colleague David Leonhardt makes the point with a few grim statistics (April 11, 2011): “In the worst economic times of the 1950s and ’60s, about 9 percent of men in the prime of their working lives (twenty-five to fifty-four years old) were not working. At the depth of the severe recession in the early 1980s, about 15 percent of prime-age men were not working. Today, more than 18 percent of such men aren’t working. That’s a depressing statistic: nearly one out of every five men between twenty-five and fifty-four is not employed. Yes, some of them are happily retired. Some are going to school. And some are taking care of their children. But most don’t fall into any of these categories. They simply aren’t working. They’re managing to get by some other way.”

Broadly speaking, today’s job market can be divided into three segments, which are steadily collapsing into two. The first includes what are known as nonroutine high-skilled jobs. A nonroutine job is one whose function cannot be reduced to an algorithm that can then be programmed into a computer or robot, or easily digitized and outsourced abroad. These jobs involve critical thinking and reasoning, abstract analytical skills, imagination, judgment, creativity, and often math. They require the ability to read a situation, to extrapolate from it, and to create something new—a new product, a new insight, a new service, a new investment, a new way of doing old things, or new things to do in new ways in an existing company. Nonroutine high-skilled work is generally the province of engineers, programmers, designers, financiers, senior executives, stock and bond traders, accountants, performers, athletes, scientists, doctors, lawyers, artists, authors, college professors, architects, contractors, chefs, specialized journalists, editors, sophisticated machine-tool operators, and innovators.

Far from supplanting these nonroutine jobs, the merger of globalization and the IT revolution has made those who do them even more productive. These workers use Google to do their own research; they use Windows to produce their own PowerPoints; they use Macs to design their own online ads, posters, and apps, as well as to edit their own films and to design their own buildings. They use laptops to create their own spreadsheets and crunch their own numbers, and cell phones to make their own trades and gather their own information. They can do all these things anywhere and do them faster and more cheaply by themselves than any secretary, clerk, or assistant can. If you fall into this nonroutine high-skilled category of work, then globalization and the IT revolution have been your friends, making you individually more productive, globally more attractive, and most likely better paid.

In the second category are routine middle-skilled jobs, involving a lot of standardized repetitive tasks, of either the white-collar or blue-collar variety. They include factory assembly-line work, number-crunching and filing in the back room of a bank or brokerage house, routine reporting for a newspaper, transcribing interviews or doctor’s notes, producing a PowerPoint presentation for the boss, making routine sales calls, or tracing lost luggage. This routine middle-skilled work has been devastated by the merger of globalization and the IT revolution. White-collar routine work—someone managing files in a bank or brokerage, for instance—which could be reduced to algorithms either got digitized and computerized or outsourced via the Internet to much cheaper labor markets.