Can America Ecucate Itself out of Inequality?(Critical Essay‪)‬

The Race between Education and Technology. By Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). In 2008, the implosion of the American economy exposed inequalities that the housing bubble and easy credit had partially masked. The social scientists and journalists who had been writing about the astonishing post-1973 growth of inequality no longer could be ignored or dismissed as leftist cranks or whiners; even politicians had to pay attention, fielding questions about staggering CEO pay while corporations laid off workers by the hundreds of thousand. The issue became how to understand inequality and what to do about it. With some notable exceptions, historians have been slow off the mark in joining this conversation, raising the question of whether, in fact, they have anything very useful to say. Now, two distinguished economic historians have plunged into the core of the debate with The Race Between Education and Technology, a book certain to generate debate about the links between inequality, education, and economic growth, past and present. (1) They ask whether Americans can once more educate themselves out of inequality. At the start of the book, the implicit answer appears to be yes, at its close, no.