The right-hand two-thirds of Figure 4 look like the plots of employment polarization. From 1979 through 2007, wages rose consistently across the high-skill portion of the figure, which is disproportionately made up of the abstract task-intensive categories of professional, technical, and managerial occupations. By contrast, wage growth in the middle-skill, typically routine task-intensive occupations was less rapid and generally decelerated over time. For the low-education, manual task-intensive occupations heavily represented on the left-hand side of Figure 4, in the 1980s, wage growth was a little more rapid than in the middle-skill occupations—and in the 1990s, it was much more rapid. However, that changed in the 2000s: while Figure 2 showed that employment growth in these occupations exceeded that in all other categories between 1999 and 2007, Figure 4 shows wage growth was generally negative in the low-skill percentiles, lower than in all other categories (Mishel, Shierholz, and Schmitt 2013). During this time period, my strong hunch is that the explanation is that declining employment in middle-skill routine task-intensive jobs led middle-skill workers—including new entrants, those displaced from routine task-intensive jobs, and those who lost jobs during recession—to enter manual task-intensive occupations instead (Smith 2013; Cortes, Jaimovich, Nekarda, and Siu 2014; Foote and Ryan 2014).