There’s still a large part of the labor force that’s been left out of the healthy growth in recent years, says MIT’s David Autor, who has done much to establish how middle-wage jobs in fields like manufacturing have disappeared and not been replaced.
“Our main labor market challenge is not a lack of high wage jobs; it’s rather the weak or non-existent wage growth in non-college jobs,” Autor wrote in an email. “Less than one-third of American workers ages 25-64 have a four year college degree or higher. After three decades of high and generally rising returns to college education, the employment and earnings opportunities of the other two-thirds of our workforce (i.e., the non-college workers) is my main concern at present.”