"has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the well-educated." I'm old enough to have seen that the lifestyle and quality of living for the average

"has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the well-educated." I'm old enough to have seen that the lifestyle and quality of living for the average college grad has decreased quite a bit over than interval, its just decreased MUCH further for non college grads, who are generally now found only in the trades, unemployed, manual labor, or are special and unusual anecdotal snowflakes. The numbers are of course better because we reward numbers. I'm writing about actual lifestyle and quality of life. Inherently there's no reason why credentials result in better bartenders, waiters, baristas, receptionists, file clerks, but it does make it somewhat more likely that a given individual will have any job at all. This gives the article a different tinge. Much as the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, some cities for arbitrary reasons may simply be more or less decayed than others. There may be some survivorship bias such that peculiar theories can be manufactured out of fundamentally random data. That city was in the FIRE business and is now rich, that city was in the automotive business, and isn't rich.