Can America Ecucate Itself Out of Inequality?

Economists Claudia Golden and Lawrence Katz claim that the race between education and technology pits the supply of educated workers against the demand for their services. For most of its course, the distance separating contestants has remained more or less the same, with exceptions between 1915 and 1940, when supply began to overtake demand, and in the years after 1980, when the pace of supply flagged. The race is crucial because the relation of supply to demand widens or narrows inequality and determines the trajectory of economic growth. Despite the authors’ stunning and invaluable empirical contributions, a number of their interpretations and, even, their book’s framework itself, remain questionable. A tension at the book’s core undermines the authors’ thesis about the implications of history for turning around the recent trajectory of American inequality.