Since, with the development of technology and the application to it of the fundamental sciences, the labor processes of society have come to embody a greater amount of scientific knowledge, clearly the "average" scientific, technical, and in the that sense "skill" content of these labor processes is much greater now than in the past.  But this is nothing but a tautology.  The question is precisely whether the scientific and "educated" content of labor tends toward averaging, or, on the contrary, toward polarization.  If the latter is the case, to then to say that the "average" skill has been raised is to adopt the logic of the statistician who, with one foot in the fire and the other in ice water, will tell you that "on the average," he is perfectly comfortable (294).