The unemployment rate for adults with a high school education or less fell from 4¾ percent in 1998 to around 4 percent by the middle of last year. And, while the proportion of small-business managers who worried about labor quality has remained elevated in the past few years, it did not increase further in spite of the decline in unemployment.
One explanation for this phenomenon is the often-observed multiplier effects of technological breakthroughs. For example, as engineers and programmers have developed increasingly more sophisticated hardware and software, the vast productive benefits of computers have become far  BIS Review 56/2001  1  more readily available to the average worker in recent years.