The US economy is in new territory, and while most celebrate the new stock market milestones and the lowest unemployment rate in fifty years, a closer look reveals a more textured picture. Not everyone is doing well. According to research by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor and economist Paul Oyer, “Times are good if you are college educated and working in the right industries in the right locations. But the last 50 years have been terrible for people with lower skills. Adjusted for inflation, the average earnings of a man who didn’t go to college is lower now than it was 50 years ago. That’s unheard of.” And more specifically, Professor Oyer notes that we reduced income inequality globally while increasing it in the United States. “The low-wage jobs that left here are considered really good jobs in China. [Globally] we’ve lifted a billion, two billion people out of poverty over the past 30 years,” Oyer wrote. Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, faculty members at the MIT Sloan School of Management, have studied the relationship between technology and the economy for years. Their efforts culminated in a seminal book, The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies,in which they chronicle how digital technologies are contributing to the stagnation of wages. Specifically, Brynjolfsson explains in a 2015 Harvard Business Reviewinterview, “In the 1980s, however, the growth in median income began to sputter. In the past 15 years it’s turned negative; once you adjust for inflation, an American household at the 50th percentile of income distribution earns less today than it did in 1998, even after accounting for changes in household size. Job growth in the private sector has also slowed—and not just because of the 2008 recession. Job gains were anemic throughout the 2000s, even when the economy was expanding. This phenomenon is what we call the Great Decoupling. The two halves of the cycle of prosperity are no longer married: Economic abundance, as exemplified by GDP and productivity, has remained on an upward trajectory, but the income and job prospects for typical workers have faltered.” Indeed, according to the Economic Policy Institute, from 1945 to 1973 the top 1% captured 4.9% of all income growth, while from 1973 to 2007, more than 58% of income growth went to the top 1%, and since the global financial crisis the top 1%’s share of income growth has held steady at more than 40%.