A bit of historical context is in order [...] even in the 1960s there was a fairly widespread understanding, on both the Left and the Right, that the United States was quickly becoming a new kind of postindustrial economy based around services and information rather than material goods. Early accounts of the postindustrial transition emphasized the emergence of a new class of technicians, managers, and other highly educated professionals. But such visions were almost always blind to the profoundly destructive and destructuring force of such an emergence. The arrival in the 1970s of the term “deindustrialization” marks a sense that this transition was far from smooth, bringing economic ruin and unemployment to vast numbers of manufacturing workers who, rendered superfluous by automation and competition from new producers in East Asia and Europe, were unable to transition to new jobs. Most commentators failed to foresee the swell of low-paid, routinized white-collar and service-sector jobs rather than high-tech skilled positions that eventually absorbed those expelled from the manufacturing sector, thereby ushering in several decades of wage stagnation. Clerical work, in this sense, is the dirty secret of the postindustrial “knowledge-based” economy.