This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 24th, 2013. I'm Caleb Brown.

Are all the good jobs gone? In the United States, it's more complicated than that.

So says Cato Institute Senior Fellow Brink-Linsky author of the book Human Capitalism,

how economic growth has made us smarter and more unequal.

We spoke last week.

Thomas Edsel writes in the New York Times

very simply the headline is

Are the good jobs gone?

And of course that ties directly

to a lot of the work that you're doing on why

growth in the United States, at least, and worldwide

is getting harder.

What do you take away from what he's got to say?

I think that the headline should really read are good jobs gone for people with less than a college

degree because the focus of this article is on something that's called

a labor market polarization.

That is the decline or the relative decline in middle skill jobs.

So we have a continuum from low skilled jobs to high skilled jobs.

And once upon a time, the growth was such that the fastest growth was in the highest skilled jobs and the lowest growth was in the lowest skilled jobs and so that over time

There was a general upskilling of the whole occupational structure.

Over the past 20 years or so, though, there has been growth in high-skilled jobs and

growth in low-skilled jobs, but middle-skilled jobs growth has been flagging. These are jobs that have some kind of expertise but are generally routine and what has happened to those is that they have either been automated or outsourced to

...