Another signal of the ongoing rise in demand for conceptual skills in recent years has been the increase in relative wages for college-educated workers. During the 1980s and much of the 1990s, as demand for skilled workers outpaced the supply, the gap between the wages of the college educated and those with a high-school diploma or less widened considerably. More recently, as labor markets tightened, that gap has leveled off. Real wage gains have picked up for workers with less than a college education. But evidence of a high skills premium for workers with college degrees remains not just for high-tech workers but across a broad range of occupations.
Innovation boosts output per hour and the freed pool of workers seek to exploit other opportunities.
Their success is evidenced by the dramatic decline in the unemployment rate since 1992. The capital invested in any endeavor needs human interaction in order to function. But the new jobs that have been created by the surge in innovation require that the workers who fill them use more of their intellectual potential. This process of stretching toward our human intellectual capacity is not likely to end any time soon. At the same time that we have been witnessing these substantial increases in the demand for human input, we see little evidence that the general level of human intelligence has changed much indeed, has changed at all over the centuries.