Part 3/18:
The nature of jobs is shifting dramatically. Routine manual and cognitive tasks—once stable pillars of the middle income—are increasingly automated across sectors like manufacturing, retail, logistics, and even parts of healthcare and finance. This "hollowing out" results in a polarization: high-skill, high-wage opportunities flourish at one end, while low-wage, low-skill roles expand at the other. Displaced middle-wage jobs decline, pushing workers into insecure or lower-paying roles, contributing to the decline in labor's share of national income—a trend driven by the falling proportion of economic output allocated to wages in favor of capital.