Class Divide Goes Digital
“Did computerization create the Great Divergence?” Slate asks if the current American class divide was worsened by the emergence of computers and the 1990’s digital divide.
“By the late 1990s, as businesses stampeded to the Internet, inequality slackened a bit. If computers were the only factor driving inequality, or even the main factor, the opposite should have happened. A final problem is that the income premium for college or graduate-level education gradually slackens off at higher incomes, even as income inequality intensifies. If computers required ever-higher levels of education to manipulate ever-growing quantities of information in ever-more rococo ways, then we’d expect the very richest people to be the biggest nerds. They aren’t.”
