The propagandists who disseminate the unblemished benefits of the technological revolution—including a considerable portion of liberal economists and commentators—claim that in the long run Americans will benefit from the demise of the old Rust Bowl industries, even if in the short term some will suffer. Both liberals and the right vehemently deny that the final tendency of the contemporary technological revolution is to permanently decrease the number of good jobs. They also reject the idea that if jobs are to become scarcer, shorter hours and guaranteed income become imperative solutions, and that refusing them will mean an inevitable reduction in living standards for perhaps a majority of the population. Instead, they stress the importance of further schooling and job training to facilitate the workers’ transformation from industrial laborers to what the former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich once termed “symbolic analysts.” What is missing from this optimistic forecast is the ratio of workers made redundant by the new technologies to the number of new good jobs that the technologies create.

The other side of technological change is the race to the bottom. Over the past thirty years, the gradual disappearance of the mass industrial worker and the weakening of the unions based on the semiskilled workers and the degradation of skilled occupations to semiskilled status has resulted in wage stagnation and decline, large-scale housing foreclosures, and growth in the number of the poor, a class largely composed of former industrial workers—now unemployed, or low-wage, or condemned to part-time service work. And the “new poor,” a class composed of the young, older workers, and some types of professionals, such as lawyers and managers, has not been created only by the depression that began in 2007; it, too, is partly the result of technological progress.

Some glib boosters do acknowledge the social and economic costs of technological change. For most of them, the solution is to accelerate the expansion of schooling, both for the young and for displaced adults. Characteristically, and in conformity with the austerity thinking that has gripped much of America, the most recent proposal and practice is to fulfill the promise of new career education by offering online courses. Once the province of for-profit colleges, Internet-driven online learning has been dramatically introduced into the mainstream and is now sponsored by elite universities like Harvard and Stanford, some of the leading public research institutions such as Illinois, and the largest urban university in the United States, the City University of New York. Faculty at these institutions are encouraged to upgrade their Internet skills to be able to take advantage of electronic study aids such as Blackboard or, more extensively, to enlist themselves as instructors in online courses.