As Alan Blinder of Princeton University trenchantly noted in 2006, “Many people blithely assume that the critical labour-market distinction is, and will remain, between highly educated (or highly skilled) people and less-educated (or less-skilled) people doctors versus call-centre operators, for example.” Instead, the crucial distinction is between those tasks that are easily digitised (and thus subject to substantial competition from workers abroad) and those that are not. As a result, in the future, a college degree by itself will be less likely to guarantee a high wage. Ongoing economic globalisation may even reduce the gap between the 90th percentile and 50th percentile, but continue to widen it between the 99.9th percentile and the 90th percentile.
