"This is accurate ... You see this both in the national job market as well as here in the North Carolina job market. In fact my research shows it's actually going on to a greater extent here in North Carolina," he says. "The reason is, first of all, on the high-salary side that's related to the changes in our economy, our high-tech economy, that's increased the demand for educated workers That's why we have more people going to college, and we see it in the statistics: Highly educated folks are the ones getting the big salary increases.

"At the low end, the lower-paying jobs ... are primarily lower-paying service jobs. These are jobs that don't require a lot of skills, but they can't be done by machines. And so we need folks and because of our economy those jobs actually expanded.

"Now in terms of the middle paying jobs these have been factory jobs, and those factory jobs have been lost either by the work going to foreign countries or by people being replaced by machinery and technology.

So this two-edged job market has created a lot of challenges for the economy as well as for society as a whole."