Many low-skill jobs (guard, driver, janitor, manual labourer) permit on-the-job consumption of forms of entertainment (listening to music or news, phoning friends) that became much cheaper and more available with the introduction of new electronic devices (first small radios, then TVs, then cellphones, smartphones). Such entertainment does not reduce productivity at the abovementioned jobs much, which is why it is allowed. On the other hand, many high-skill jobs (planning, communicating, performing surgery) are difficult to combine with any entertainment, because the distraction would decrease productivity significantly. The utility of low-skill work thus increased relatively more than that of skilled jobs when electronics spread and cheapened. The higher utility made low-skill jobs relatively more attractive, so the supply of labour at these increased relatively more. This supply rise reduced the pay relative to high-skill jobs, which increased income inequality. Another way to describe this mechanism is that as the disutility of low-skill jobs fell, so did the real wage required to compensate people for this disutility.

An empirically testable implication of this theory is that jobs of any skill level that do not allow on-the-job entertainment should have seen salaries increase more than comparable jobs which can be combined with listening to music or with personal phone calls. For example, a janitor cleaning an empty building can make personal calls, but a cleaner of a mall (or other public venue) during business hours may be more restricted. Both can listen to music on their headphones, so the salaries should not have diverged when small cassette players went mainstream, but should have diverged when cellphones with headsets became cheap. Similarly, a trucker or nightwatchman has more entertainment options than a taxi driver or mall security guard, because the latter do not want to annoy customers with personal calls or loud music. A call centre operator is more restricted from audiovisual entertainment than a receptionist.

According to the above theory, the introduction of radios and cellphones should have increased the wage inequality between areas with good and bad reception, for example between remote rural and urban regions, or between underground and aboveground mining. On the other hand, the introduction of recorded music should not have increased these inequalities as much, because the availability of records is more similar across regions than radio or phone coverage.