Class Divide Goes Digital
“Did computerization create the Great Divergence?” Slate asks if the current American class divide was worsened by the emergence of computers and the 1990’s digital divide.
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“By the late 1990s, as businesses stampeded to the Internet, inequality slackened a bit. If computers were the only factor driving inequality, or even the main factor, the opposite should have happened. A final problem is that the income premium for college or graduate-level education gradually slackens off at higher incomes, even as income inequality intensifies. If computers required ever-higher levels of education to manipulate ever-growing quantities of information in ever-more rococo ways, then we’d expect the very richest people to be the biggest nerds. They aren’t.”
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