largely black and Hispanic in composition, on the other.

Those who insist that America has become a middle-class society point not only to the proportional decline of the old work force employed in manufacturing but to the rise of a new middle class of salaried employees, which has allegedly absorbed the old middle class of small property holders and will eventually absorb the working class as well. According to these optimists, "every vocation has grown more complicated" in our postindustrial society, and the growing need for technical expertise, at every level of employment, can be expected to reduce the distance between social classes, to equalize educational opportunity, and eventually to make access to steady salaried employment—with all its attendant advantages in the form of job security, benefits, and retirement annuities— almost universal. But this comforting picture of a classless, prosperous society bears little resemblance to the emerging reality. The idea that an "information society" demands a highly skilled work force is untenable. It may still be true, in the words of a recent report on education, that "the demand for highly skilled workers in new fields is accelerating rapidly," but it is also true—as this report characteristically fails to point out—that the demand for unskilled workers is accelerating even faster.

In the mid-eighties, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a set of employment projections for the next ten years. Of the twenty-five occupations expected to rank as the most heavily populated in 1995, not one derived in any direct way from the "information explosion." ^* The first

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In order of their projected numbers, on a conservative estimate, these occupations were listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as building custodians, sales clerks, secretaries, general office clerks, cashiers, elementary and preschool teachers, waiters and waitresses, truck drivers, nurses, engineers of all kinds, metalworking operatives, sales representatives (technical), cooks and chefs, supervisors of blue-collar workers, nurses' aides and orderlies, farm owners and tenants, store managers, accountants, kitchen helpers, typists, auto mechanics, second teachers, stock handlers, carpenters, and "food preparation and service workers, fast food restaurants." On the other hand, the five fastest-growing lines of work, as distinguished from those expected to be most numerous, owed their existence, at least indirectly, to the high-tech economy: legal assistants, computer service technicians, systems analysts, computer programmers, and computer operators. It is by no means clear, however, that all of these should be considered highly skilled occupations.

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