In the form given to it by Jerome in the sentence cited above, the phrase upon which the issue turns is “average skill.” Since, with the development of technology and the application to it of the fundamental sciences, the labor processes of society have come to embody a greater amount of scientific knowledge, clearly the “average” scientific, technical, and in that sense “skill” content of these labor processes is much greater now than in the past. But this is nothing but a tautology. The question is precisely whether the scientific and “educated” content of labor tends toward averaging, or, on the contrary, toward polarization. If the latter is the case, to then say that the “average” skill has been raised is to adopt the logic of the statistician who, with one foot in the fire and the other in ice water, will tell you that “on the average,” he is perfectly comfortable. The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers. On the contrary, not only does their skill fall in an absolute sense (in that they lose craft and traditional abilities without gaining new abilities adequate to compensate the loss), but it falls even more in a relative sense. The more science is incorporated into the labor process, the less the worker understands of the process; the more sophisticated an intellectual product the machine becomes, the less control and comprehension of the machine the worker has. In other words, the more the worker needs to know in order to remain a human being at work, the less does he or she know. This is the chasm which the notion of “average skill” conceals.