The Race between Education and Technology

by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F Katz

Recommendations from our site

“This book is important because it captures another conventional wisdom with respect to automation: that the best response to the challenge is ‘more’ education. And it does this in a wonderfully clear and engaging way.” Read more...

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Daniel Susskind, Economist

“This is a really wonderful book. It gives a masterful outline of the standard economic model, where earnings are proportional to contribution, or to productivity. It highlights in a very clear manner what determines the productivities of different individuals and different groups. It takes its cue from a phrase that the famous Dutch economist, Jan Tinbergen coined. The key idea is that technological changes often increase the demand for more skilled workers, so in order to keep inequality in check you need to have a steady increase in the supply of skilled workers in the economy. He called this “the race between education and technology”. If the race is won by technology, inequality tends to increase, if the race is won by education, inequality tends to decrease.” Read more...

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Daron Acemoglu, Economist

“What I think is really ingenious about this book is that it squares the circle. In the 1990s Bill Clinton told us that computers had revolutionised what was required from the workforce and that all of a sudden you needed to get a college education to perform in this knowledge-based economy. Goldin and Katz actually point out that the technological changes at the beginning of the 20th century were probably a lot more dramatic. At the beginning of the 20th century you had the spread of electricity, then the advent of radio, the spread of air travel and the growth of television. And as technological change imposed greater and greater skill demands on workers, the skill level of American workers rose and rose. Why? Simultaneously the United States was experiencing the high-school movement.” Read more...

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Timothy Noah, Journalist