Livia Gershon on Salon critiques Tom Friedman’s take on the present and future of the American economy. Of course Friedman’s take isn’t unique. The positive viewpoint on an economy that requires a lot of the individual and holds out promises of how great the rewards can be so long as you work hard to adapt to the needs of the economy can be found everywhere in the pundit-scape.

Gershon’s way to illustrate the problems with that view is to look at the situation of Karl Tiedemann and his friends and family, many of whom have had no choice but to live with Karl and his wife because working or not, they don’t have the funds to have a place of their own. Karl talks about how easy it was for him when he was young to leave one job and find another immediately. He did this more than a few times before he started working at the company where he still works 25 years later. But Karl knows that it’s different now.

Karl does worry they’ll keep coming back, because, for the most part, the work young people in his family have found is low-paid service-sector jobs. And here’s where Karl’s view of the world really diverges from Friedman’s. The columnist basically defines these jobs out of existence.

“There is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation,” Friedman writes. “Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever.”

It’s a subtle sleight of-hand that draws on things we all know — lots of decent working-class jobs have left the country or been automated out of existence. The twist is that he acts like this is true of all low- to middle-skilled jobs. Factories are increasingly automated, iPhones are made in China, a table-side console could replace waiters, and, voilà, the only work remaining in the country is being a super-innovative techie of some sort.

This is not an oversight. Friedman doesn’t ignore low-wage jobs just because they’re beneath his notice. Pretending that they simply don’t exist is the product of a worldview that treats corporate decisions, and government support for corporate needs, as a fact of nature: Decent jobs that demand little formal training haven’t been transformed into bad jobs by the erosion of the minimum wage, the decline of unions and the upward redistribution of companies’ budgets. They’ve simply disappeared in a puff of technology.

In reality, of course, there are lots of low- and middle-skilled jobs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, four of the five projected fastest-growing jobs between 2010 and 2020 — retail salespersons, home health aides, personal care aides and general office clerks — don’t demand a college degree. (Friedman might be surprised to hear that the exception is not high-tech start-up founders but registered nurses.)

These kinds of jobs — varied, hands-on work dealing with live human customers — are probably some of the things advanced technology is least equipped to deal with. But the typical annual wages for those four fast-growing jobs are all below $27,000. Three of them pay less than $21,000.

As Karl and his family could tell you, that’s not enough.

You see, Karl lives in the real world and wears no blinders. It’s not just Friedman that could benefit by meeting him, his family and friends. But of course meeting them isn’t enough. A lot of pundits would also need to listen to Karl and the large number of people like him and take their stories to heart.