More recently economic polarization has been connected to both automation and the export of jobs to low wage countries.
As a result, current computer technologies are able to handle them, or, alternatively, they can be outsourced electronically to foreign websites to be performed by comparatively low-wage workers.
Unionization has mixed effects on polarization, since it tends to raise wages at all levels, but reduces the differences between managerial and other employees.
[citation needed] These laws generally are plutocratic and accrue benefit to those at the top, at the expense of those in the middle, driving many of the latter into the bottom.
Polarization became an issue during the 2012 United States presidential election when Joe Biden asserted that the previous policies had "eviscerated" and "buried" the middle class.
[8][9] This picked up on Stiglitz' statement: "But in recent years, America’s middle class has become eviscerated,..."[10] Job polarization has also changed the nature of business cycle recoveries.