After they complete their education, they enter fulfilling and prestigious careers. Their incomes continue to rise even when income growth stagnates for everyone else. By their maturity, these fortunate ones commonly have six-figure incomes. Technology works in their behalf, expanding their options and their freedom, putting unprecedented resources at their command, enhancing their ability to do what they enjoy doing. In the other group, life gets worse, and its members collect at the bottom of society.
Poverty is severe, drugs and crime are rampant, and the traditional family all but disappears.
Economic growth passes them by. Technology is not a partner in their lives, but an electronic opiate. They live together in urban centers or scattered in rural backwaters, but their presence hovers over the other parts of town and countryside as well, creating fear, indifference, or resentment in the rest of society, seldom openly expressed but festering nonetheless. Pressures from these contrasting movements at the opposite ends of society put terrific stress on the entire structure. The mass of the nation belongs to neither group, but their lives are increasingly shaped by the power of the fortunate few and the helplessness associated with the despairing few.