Book review: The Race between Education and Technology

In a post last August, I promised a review of The Race between Education and Technology, by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz. After a pandemic-induced delivery delay, and clearing a few other books off my must-read-this-soon list, I've finally finished the book. The easiest way to describe this book is that it is a monograph - essentially, a book-length version of a journal article, with all of the technical detail (and more). It is not really a book written for a general audience. However, while I probably just made it sound negative, that is actually a good thing. Goldin and Katz take the time to fully develop most of their arguments, delving deeply into the data on US education from the 19th Century through until the early 21st Century.

The book's main thrust is an explanation of the changes in inequality in the US over the course of the 20th Century. It is neatly summarised as:

...technological change, education, and inequality... are intricately related in a kind of "race". During the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, the rising supply of educated workers outstripped the increased demand caused by technological advances. Higher real incomes were accompanied by lower inequality. But during the last two decades of the century the reverse was the case and there was sharply rising inequality. Put another way, in the first half of the century, education raced ahead of technology, but later in the century, technology raced ahead of educational gains... The skill bias of technology did not change much across the century, nor did its rate of change. Rather, the sharp rise in inequality was largely due to an educational slowdown.

In the first part of the book, Goldin and Katz review the data on inequality, and then show that skills-biased technological change did not change much over the course of the 20th Century. They then exhaustively review the data on educational change in the US from the 19th Century, through the 'High School movement', and into the later 20th Century where university and college education became the norm for most young people. I learned a lot about the development of the education system in the US, especially the private and public divide in education, both at high school and then at university level. Throughout most of the period, the US maintained a lead in average years of education among its citizenry, compared with other developed countries.

However, as noted in the final chapter of the book, the US has more recently lost its educational advantage, not only in terms of the quantity of education, but also in terms of its quality. Other countries have similar, if not greater, proportion of young people attaining university degrees, and the US is lagging in important measures of educational quality such as the PISA tests of high school reading, mathematics, and science literacy. In contrast with the rest of the book, this section was somewhat underdeveloped. But to be fair, it would require another book to really do the topic justice. Goldin and Katz note that:

Two factors appear to be holding back the educational attainment of many American youth... The first is the lack of college readiness of youth who drop out of high school and of the substantial numbers who obtain a high school diploma but remain academically unprepared for college... The second is the financial access to higher education for those who are college ready.

Although those statements aren't backed by the same depth of analysis and evidentiary support that the rest of the book exhibits, I found them to accord with my own views of the situation in New Zealand as well. Although our education system differs in important ways from the US system, the problems appear to be similar. High schools are not fully preparing students for university education, and there are significant financial barriers that not only stop students from enrolling in university, but also prevent those who do enrol from succeeding to their full potential and maximising their education gains (see my earlier post on this point). The underlying reasons for these problems are not explored in as much detail as they could (and should) be, but Goldin and Katz briefly outline a policy prescription:

The first policy is to create greater access to quality pre-school education for children from disadvantaged families. The second is to rekindle some of the virtues of American education and improve the operation of K-12 schooling so that more kids graduate from high school and are ready for college. The third is to make financial aid sufficiently generous and transparent so that those who are college ready can complete a four-year college degree or gain marketable skills at a community college.

Given the depth of the rest of the book, the policy prescription seems somewhat superficial and underwhelming to me. It would have been nice to have seen how the data supported those proposed policies, or at least a more detailed and robust case made for them.

Nevertheless, despite the final chapter, this is an excellent book, well-written and definitely an exemplar for the comprehensive treatment of historical data, with a strong underlying theoretical model. However, it is worth noting that their more recent update on the research (which I blogged about here), suggests that the theoretical model does not do as good a job of explaining the rise in income inequality in the US in the period from 2000 to 2017. Given that the recent article presents more recent data, for anyone interested in the topic, that article is a better place to start. However, for those wanting to go deeper into the data and the model, this book provides the detail.