America's major cities: creating job inequalities?

It's 9pm, you leave your office in New York's business district, ask the babysitter to pick up an Amazon package before you arrive, then order a bo-bun to be delivered right on time for your return home. Although fictional, this story describes an increasingly common scenario in major urban metropolises that economists Fabio Cerina, Elisa Dienesch, Alessio Moro and Michelle Rendall call "spatial polarization". In large American cities where technological advances are more rapid than anywhere else,, there is an increasing number highly-skilled workers, but also a considerable increase in jobs requiring no qualifications carried out by low-skilled workers.

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Dialogues économiques is a digital magazine published by the Aix-Marseille School of Economics (AMU, CNRS, EHESS, Centrale Méditerranée) A bridge between academic research and society, Dialogues économiques provides all citizens with the keys to economic reasoning. Articles are published every two weeks.

Technical progress, a generator of inequality?

The polarization of jobs reflects two phenomena: the decline of the "middle classe" and the rise of extreme inequalities. On the labour market, we observe a distribution of skills which represents the distribution of jobs by qualification levels, ranging from the least qualified to the most qualified. The market becomes polarized when there is a simultaneous increase in the proportion of highly-skilled workers (such as managers, engineers, intellectual professions) and the proportion of low-skilled workers (like employees in personal services), at the expense of medium-skilled jobs (such that technicians, intermediate or administrative professions).

The question arises: what are the sources of this phenomenon? Initially, economic research focused on the decline of medium-skilled jobs, mainly in the industrial sector, often associated with routine tasks. The initial explanation centered around the automation of tasks, where capital replaced routine work.