1. Businesses are hesitant to invest in capital.
2. The housing market is terrible right now--especially housing starts.
3. Jobs related to #2 and #3 generally go to lower-skilled workers. They're the ones who are struggling right now (with something like 16% unemployment for men without a HS diploma).
This isn't the end of the American economy, people. Demand is low for goods produced by low-skilled, American-based labor. Things will improve with time.
I'm torn about QE3. There's little evidence that businesses are waiting on it specifically to make capital expenditure decisions; it seems, from reading the Beige Book and other anecdotes that companies might be waiting for the other shoe to drop. QE3 would just adjust the shoe on the foot a bit.
I imagine the majority of American workers have a HS degree, at least.
Not true. The Industrial Revolution was preceded (in England) by an Agricultural Revolution that displaced peasants in large numbers to cities where they didn't have nearly enough work. (Many emigrated to the New World.)
Thus the later economic boom was preceded by economic hard times.
And its not just wage that must be considered. There are hidden costs of hiring and possibly having to fire an employee, all of which have gone up in recent decades.
People imagine that employers can be made to do all kinds of costly things without effect on employment. Or take home pay. And in good times, it may seem like there are no such effects.
But its in the bad times that consequences are felt, long after the legislation has been passed. If an employer cannot make money hiring a particular worker at the minimum legal wage, the worker isn't going to be hired (legally, anyway).
This has nothing to do with technology adoption.
(HN submission: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2850520)
There's a table called "U.S. Occupations with at least one million workers (2006)". Every type of job there has existed since 1948. There are no new job categories created with over a million workers.
Jobs, and therefore people, have specialized more, that's all.
A second answer might be that we're only now fully realizing the effects of globalization -- outsourcing, moving factories to China, call centers to India, etc... due to the advances in telecommunications and whatnot. Perhaps there was an underlying structural shift as early as the 90's, but we were coasting on the housing boom. I recognize that that's a rather hand-wavey argument. IANAE.