What to Read: Meditations on a World Divided - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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What’s different about Murray’s analysis is that his villain — largely implicit in the book, but a central presence nonetheless — is the cultural revolution of the 1970s and the consequent relaxation of traditional social restraints, like the disapproval of child-bearing out of wedlock.
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What’s missing from Murray’s book, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his column on Friday, is money. There is absolutely a cultural chasm between the 1 percent and the 99 percent (as I argued in The Atlantic last year) — but culture is a symptom and not a cause of the gap. What’s going on is what MIT economist David Autor has dubbed the polarization of the labor market and what Maarten Goos and Alan Manning at the Centre for Economic Performance at the LSE call the division of the world of work into “lousy” and “lovely” jobs.
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Part of that shift is being driven by the technology revolution, whose latest wave is the rise of the machine-to-machine economy