[lrajlich]

The issue is that distributional losses historically have been significantly underestimated in terms of scale and persistence or glossed over as insignificant. Economists traditionally have held that workers who lose their jobs to free trade, while losing their job in the short term, find a new job elsewhere and ultimately are better off. This is turning out to not be the case, some workers persistently remain worse off.

[resters]

To be fair, the rate of economic change is increasing, so part of the problem is that workers over-invest in skills only to have those skills obsoleted by the changing landscape.

So of course the worker who over-invested in job A and was compensated based on that over-investment is going to be worse off in job B when he/she has under-invested in the skills needed for job B.

The fields that are best for workers today are those that have built in required continuing education, or fields in which rapid change is widely acknowledged and understood by the workforce (software engineering, etc.)