Let’s pull out a section from this long piece on Pikkety, inequality, and education from David Leonhardt. It’s a perfect example of how the unsupported presumptions of our media elites have created the destructive conventional wisdom that we need to educate our way out of our economic problems.
When a society becomes more educated, many of its less-wealthy citizens quickly acquire an ephemeral but nonetheless crucial form of capital — knowledge — that can bring enormous returns. They learn to make objects and accomplish tasks more efficiently, and they sometimes create entirely new objects (or services). They become those children in the small village who attended school, went off to work in a factory, became managers and made bigger economic leaps above their parents than those of the large farmer did.
This is remarkable because it poses more inequality as a solution to inequality. The children of the large farmer existed, and their decline relative to the improvements of the children in the small village represents growing inequality. Even if we take Leonhardt’s little fable about education and economics at face value (and we shouldn’t), he’s describing a process that exacerbates economic difference, not that closes it. This is part of what makes the elite consensus that education can solve this problem so strange: education is a way to raise your value relative to other workers, and as such is uniquely ill-suited to creating a more equitable society. Suppose every mindless invocation of “teaching a kid to code” and solving the (fake, unreal, false, untrue) STEM shortage came to pass. Suppose we were able to take every poor kid who is failing out of school and were able to get all of them advanced degrees in petrochemical engineering and biomedical sciences or whatever. That would necessarily mean, by the most elementary principles of economics, that the economic advantage of having such a degree would decline. If we actually could make every kid truly educationally equal, education’s economic advantage would not exist.
But of course, we can’t, actually, make every kid educationally equal. And this is another of the Bizarro World aspects of this conversation. A century of educational research demonstrates that there will always be a significant percentage of students who fail to meet arbitrary standards. Not all of those less-wealthy citizens got educated and became more wealthy, as Leonhardt is surely aware, and it’s strange to think that we can just decide to make that different this time around. The reasons for inequality in educational outcomes are controversial, with some more likely to claim the primacy of natural or genetic advantage, and others more likely to claim the primacy of demographic, economic and social factors. But ultimately the reasons are less important than the reality: human beings are substantially unequal in their intellectual or academic abilities, they always have been, and there’s no reason to believe that’s going to stop being the case. That it makes people so uncomfortable to talk about is not a compelling reason to ignore that fact.
The great income gains for the American middle class and poor in the mid-to-late 20th century came after this country made high school universal and turned itself into the most educated nation in the world. As the economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have written, “The 20th century was the American century because it was the human-capital century.” Education continues to pay today, despite the scare stories to the contrary. The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else in this country is near its all-time high. The countries that have done a better job increasing their educational attainment, like Canada and Sweden, have also seen bigger broad-based income gains than the United States.
You guys know I am the last to say “correlation does not imply causation,” but this strikes me as an absolutely classic example of mistaking “these things went together, therefore one caused the other, and in the way that helps my analysis.” I mean, documenting the reasons for America’s low income inequality in the 20th century, by all accounts, is a central argument of Pikkety’s book! Those arguments, about the unique conditions created by the world-shaking events of the Great Depression and two world wars, strike me as vastly more intuitively compelling and empirically well-supported than the idea that it was because we became a more educated society.
The guy who’s been making this case better and more frequently than anyone has been Matt Bruenig, and I highly encourage you to read his careful, data-supported work. Here’s the perfect place to start. As Bruenig writes,
Beyond that more theoretical exposition, the last 4 decades has been an excellent experiment for this idea. In that period, we nearly tripled overall college attainment. That tripling coincided with substantial productivity gains, but also coincided with forty years of income stagnation, growing inequality, and flat poverty rates. More recently, we’ve even seen labor’s share of the national income take a plunge. With productivity gains flowing almost entirely to the top 10 percent and now to capital, the college education solution to our distributive problems looks to be even more of a dead-end than it has been in the recent past.
Leonhardt’s position is very common. But it seems simply unsupportable to me. Education is not a solution to poverty or inequality and even if it were, we have non-negotiable and persistent impediments to reaching equality in educational outcomes. If you told me that I could have ten minutes to make a presentation to the members of our elite media, and I had to pick one case to make in those ten minutes, it would be this case. I would make the case that education does not solve economic problems for individuals or society, and that in fact the best evidence is that this is backwards– that economic reform can solve educational problems but not the other way around.
There are some reasons for optimism in education. Charter schools and school systems that have tried to introduce more accountability offer some lessons about what works and doesn’t in K-12.
This notion, that we’ve figured out what “works” in public education and surprise surprise it’s the anti-teacher, anti-union, pro-privatization stuff, exists solely in the collective assumptions of our media. It is amazing how quickly this is congealing as conventional wisdom. I mean the empirical case simply does not exist. The median charter school– and that’s what matters, when we’re talking about society-level changes, as Leonhardt is– remains indistinguishable, if not worse, than the median regular public school. Those charter schools that do see significant gains are small-scale ventures in which those pushing for education privatization invest enormous resources of expertise and attention, often with unique infrastructural and institutional advantages that simply cannot be adopted by most schools, staffed by teachers who have a disconcerting tendency to quit after a short time, and whose results we have no evidence are scalable to our enormous public system. Charter schools seem to understand the dominance of student-side demographic factors better than almost anyone, given the lengths they go to in order to avoid educating the hardest to educate.
The key word is “accountability,” which is a clear indicator of the Green Lantern Theory of education, and thinking that something is so because we need it to be so.
The total number of college graduates has begun rising again.
True, and good, but again, all college graduates are not created equal. Let’s use the Collegiate Learning Assessment as a limited but useful indicator of college learning.
These are college averages for score on the CLA, with the blue data points and regression line the freshman administrations and the red data points and regression line the senior administration. From an absolute point of view, this is great news; every college in this large data set is seeing significant gains in student performance from freshman to senior year. But for creating a more equal society, it’s not good news, because we can see that the left-most group– the students who come in the furthest behind– show significant gains, but not nearly enough to catch up to the students on the right-hand side, who come in further ahead. In fact the gap between the regression lines slightly grows. If a college degree is just a social signifier that employers use to vet potential candidates, then we shouldn’t see college degrees through this economic lens anyway. If what employers should chase is people who perform well on this kind of capitalism-friendly metric (which comports with the “accountability” movement’s obsession with standardized tests), then they should chase those at the top anyway.
Education is an undeniable social good. But its ability to remove people from poverty is unproven, and its reputation as an inequality killer seems literally backwards. If we want to solve inequality, we should do what we know works: redistribute money.
I don’t get this fascination with Piketty. The rich get richer, the poor poorer, I get it, I’ve heard it all my life, where’s the revelation? Why? Well, simply because the rich have all the power, of course. And until a bunch of them get killed and the rest get scared shitless they’ll keep getting richer.
I was listening to this Piketty guy on the radio about a week ago; it was pathetic. He was debating some AEI-sounding guy. The AEI-sounding guy was saying something like: ‘if you want to save your money and leave it to your children, I don’t see a problem with that. What we need is great education.’ Piketty was replying: ‘oh yes, of course, education IS the most important thing. But still…’
Seriously, what’s so good or interesting about Piketty?
I think the concept which has taken a lot of American readers by surprise is this idea that inequality declined in the mid-20th century not because freemarket democracy was increasing social mobility, but rather because the two World Wars destroyed the upper class’s inherited wealth. And that, by extension, as we get further and further away from the World Wars in time, capitalism is reverting back to its Gilded Age norm of extreme inequality and massive amounts of inherited wealth.
The war destroyed a lot of factories and infrastructure in Europe, and that obviously boosted the rate of growth.
But that was not the reason for decrease in inequality. The reason was that they got scared of communism; not only it survived the war, it was expanding. They had to compete, they had to show that capitalism can be beneficial to ALL socioeconomic groups. Thus the civil rights, war on poverty, and all that. They were afraid. Not anymore, not for a while.
His silly r > g formula, it’s just ludicrous: no matter what g is, they can always pump r up as high as they want, as long as there are no daily riots on the streets. It’s all politics, it has very little to do with economics.
I usually think the people arguing that more and better education will reduce inequality are playing a shell game with the term, although that doesn’t appear to be the case with Leonhardt. They’re not talking about reducing inequality so much as theoretically increasing social mobility, which goes with the conservative false talk about “equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome”.
In practice, it doesn’t work that way. Bruenig pointed out that inequality didn’t change despite a massive expansion in the breadth and depth of education in the country, but you could also point to the lack of change in social mobility in 40 years as another reminder of the limitations on education’s power.
Some of the better charter school set-ups, like KIPP, the Harlem Children’s Zone, and Success Academy don’t do that with admissions, although they probably do it with disabled and troubled students- and in any case they’ve got tons of money backing them.
“Some of the better charter school set-ups, like KIPP, the Harlem Children’s Zone, and Success Academy don’t do that with admissions”
Yes, they pretty much do. Certainly KIPP does, and it’s well-established that the big KIPP gains come from the schools that require parental commitments and have more control:. You can read Matthew diCarlo, or I just go through the highlights here:
http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/kipp-mathematica-study-and-bragging-rights/
And KIPP isn’t a particularly good setup. Certainly they haven’t had much success in high school at dramatically raising scores. What they’re fairly good at is getting motivated kids caught up in basic skills.
This was a great post, by the way.
“it’s well-established that the big KIPP gains come from the schools that require parental commitments”
The parental commitment factor is an interesting one.
From my experience, local conventional schools literally resist parental commitment. Oh, they welcome parental help with fund-raisers and the like, but they’re loathe to allow parents any influence other than as homework police.
Charter schools treat parents like clients; conventional schools treat parents like nuisances.
Charter schools don’t treat parents like clients. All schools–charter, private, public–treat parents the same way: we give lip service to wanting you around but eh, maybe not so much. Public schools need to alert parents to behavior problems, whereas charters and privates can boot for behavior.
The parental commitment is not helpful in and of itself; it’s just a signal of higher functioning families and usually higher cognitive ability.
Maybe it’s me, but I’m having trouble making sense of this paragraph. The relative decline of the large farmer’s children as the children in the small village improve makes life more…unequal? Eliminating the economic advantage from education increases economic inequality? How, exactly? By leveling the playing field?
I think it’s self-evident that universal public education at least partially explains the rise of the middle class and improved standards of living, whether or not we’ve figured out “what ‘works’ in public education.” It probably also helps mitigate other forces that tend to cause unequal wealth accumulation (and I think this is Leonhardt’s core point). As you note, educated people have an “economic advantage,” and giving the poor a chance to seize such an advantage – or at least close the gap – strikes me as one (of many) logical way(s) to reduce inequality. And the fact that the wealthy leverage existing education systems to protect their economic advantages suggests that they understand this.
It also seems pretty clear that expanded access to universities has helped many families escape the cycle of poverty, whether or not every poor person who goes to college succeeds. Not to argue from anecdote, but this is certainly true of my own Mississippi sharecropper clan.
Also, too: Isn’t taxing the wealthy to provide public education to poor people part of the “redistribute money” regime?
It’s you. The farmer’s children fall behind those of the children in the small village– they become less equal. As for your third sentence, Leonhardt calls for more education as a solution to economic inequality. I’m arguing that this fails in both directions at once: in the real world, we won’t get everyone to the same level of education, so that will increase inequality, not decrease it. And even in Leonhardt’s imaginary world where everyone gets more education, the advantage he’s talking about would decline, meaning that education couldn’t be used as a lever to move people to higher relative economic status. If education were literally the only thing that drives inequality, it’s true that getting to a equal playing field educationally would do so economically. But nobody believes that, because it’s absurd.
It also seems pretty clear that expanded access to universities has helped many families escape the cycle of poverty, whether or not every poor person who goes to college succeeds. Not to argue from anecdote, but this is certainly true of my own Mississippi sharecropper clan.
Sure. But, again– only about a third of American adults has a bachelor’s degree. That makes it valuable to have one, but only for that third, and the relative advantage would decline as more people become educated. Like I said, there’s tons of reason to want to educate everybody, but inequality is a screwy one.
Also, too: Isn’t taxing the wealthy to provide public education to poor people part of the “redistribute money” regime?
Sure! And I am very happy to do more. But we don’t do much of that, I’m sorry to say, any more.
Sorry, maybe it’s not me. “The farmer’s children fall behind those of the children in the small village– they become less equal” was not part of your original argument – or at least you don’t make this point clearly.
Doing so now doesn’t clarify either – what makes you think the big farmers’ children will fall behind? I suppose it’s true that if the poor children use education to surpass the big farmers’ children then education has not solved the inequality problem – it’s just reversed the advantage. But I see no reason to believe this would happen, and in fact real world experience suggests that the advantaged maintain their position by reserving the best education opportunities for themselves even as they provide some measure of education to the poor.
The original inequality in the hypothetical village depends on the ability of the wealthy to both produce more and then save some of the proceeds, building wealth through returns on capital rather than labor productivity. This doesn’t change when the poor children in the village receive training that makes them more productive and generally improves their ability to do the same. Even if the big farmers’ children don’t get this training they still have the legacy capital accumulation advantage. Please explain more clearly how improving the condition of the poor through education makes inequality worse. I know that with your rhetoric training you can do it.
No one argues that education is the only thing driving inequality. Nor is anyone arguing that bringing everyone to exactly the same education level is possible (or even desirable). But more broadly educated societies have demonstrably less inequality. This could depend on the ways education makes individuals more productive and more sensible about how they use the proceeds of their labor/capital investment. Perhaps it’s because educated people understand the importance of collective action and redistribution so they vote for both.
In any event, to the extent either or both of these statements is true, then we can indeed educate our way out of our economic problems (defined as “too much inequality”).
I suppose it’s true that if the poor children use education to surpass the big farmers’ children then education has not solved the inequality problem – it’s just reversed the advantage.
That is, indeed, my point, so I don’t know who you think you’re disagreeing with or how. Reversing the advantage definitionally means that the amount of inequality has remained the same.
The original inequality in the hypothetical village depends on the ability of the wealthy to both produce more and then save some of the proceeds, building wealth through returns on capital rather than labor productivity. This doesn’t change when the poor children in the village receive training that makes them more productive and generally improves their ability to do the same.
Indeed. Again, my exact argument: inequality is not solved by education. You are again telling me I’m wrong, supporting my argument, and then again telling me I’m wrong. Also, you’re ignoring the other basic plank of my argument: not all the children in the village do get effectively educated, and not all of them do become more productive or better paid, so not all of them do improve materially. Instead they fall further behind– exacerbating inequality.
Even if the big farmers’ children don’t get this training they still have the legacy capital accumulation advantage. Please explain more clearly how improving the condition of the poor through education makes inequality worse.
Education is not a good we only deliver to the poor. Indeed: the better off fair significantly better in education than the poor, so their relative advantage grows. This is not complicated.
I know that with your rhetoric training you can do it.
Now, now. Be a troll or argue, but don’t step from one foot to the other.
Given that you immediately agreed with my humble statement that my not getting your point could be my failure, without a similarly polite suggestion that you had perhaps not been clear, it seemed fair enough to remind you that you’re the one claiming expertise in explaining things. If that makes me a troll then let the troll ask: If “…poor children use education to surpass the big farmers’ children then education has not solved the inequality problem – it’s just reversed the advantage” is exactly your point, then why didn’t you just say this? Would have saved lots of…rhetoric.
In any event, you seem to be making at least three different (and contradictory) arguments, none of which my responses support. First you suggest that improving the position of the poor would increase inequality by allowing them to surpass the rich. Indeed, this is “exactly [your] point.” But I challenge this by asking how this would happen given that (as you later agree) the wealthy would have the same or better access to education. You don’t respond to this criticism except to pretty much agree with it later in your reply. Anyway it’s not clear how “the wealthy would stay ahead by taking the best education opportunities” supports your claim that “education would increase inequality by allowing the poor to surpass the rich.”
Then you claim that education increases inequality because it will not improve everyone’s productivity. This argument that education creates winners and losers says very little about whether it reduces inequality – it certainly would to the extent it makes the population as a whole more productive and expands the cohort of citizens who can accumulate and profit from owning capital assets. Either way, it’s not clear how my claim that the wealthy retain their capital accumulation advantage whether or not they achieve the productivity benefits of education, and therefore don’t fall behind the newly educated poor, supports the assertion that education increases inequality because not all the poor get the benefits.
Finally, you seem to imply that education does not raise all boats equally – that the wealthy would benefit more than the poor, and education therefore increases inequality. This of course makes sense, but contradicts your “exact point” that inequality would increase as the small village kids surpass the big farmers’. Which is it? And though you hint at this in your original post with your SAT/CLA graph, this says little to nothing about whether education helps the poor catch up to the wealthy unless you can show that the less-well-prepared students are also the poorest. While this makes intuitive sense and may well be so your graph does not make this point without more evidence of such a correlation.
To be sure, education will not completely solve the inequality problem, and you construct a straw man if you think Mr. Leonhardt or I believe it will. But expanded education does correspond to more egalitarian societies and I’ve proposed two ways this could happen: expanding the middle class by increasing productivity among the heretofore poor, and expanded willingness to act collectively and redistribute. You address neither.
I get that you think that you’re being really cutting and insightful here, I really do. But you’re in well over your head. It’s clear that you really don’t know what inequality is.
First you suggest that improving the position of the poor would increase inequality by allowing them to surpass the rich.
If the poor and rich literally switch places, which is the hypothetical we’re dealing with here, then inequality would be unchanged. If the poor outpaced where the rich had previously been, inequality would increase. We can debate if you want to simply thinks, but because inequality is a measure of economic distance, then swapping places is a zero sum game as far as inequality goes. You really seem not to understand what inequality is.
But I challenge this by asking how this would happen given that (as you later agree) the wealthy would have the same or better access to education.
Indeed. I am in fact saying two separate things, as I’ve now told you many times. Please try hard to keep up here: one, even if Leonhardt’s dreams come true, it wouldn’t solve the problems he says it would, and two, Leonhardt’s dreams aren’t going to come true. This is not, at all, a contradiction. In fact it’s an absolutely standard way of arguing: your solution wouldn’t fix things if it worked, and anyway, it’s not going to work. There’s nothing remotely internally contradictory about that.
You don’t respond to this criticism except to pretty much agree with it later in your reply. Anyway it’s not clear how “the wealthy would stay ahead by taking the best education opportunities” supports your claim that “education would increase inequality by allowing the poor to surpass the rich.”
Don’t use quotes that you imply are mine when in fact they’re yours.
Then you claim that education increases inequality because it will not improve everyone’s productivity. This argument that education creates winners and losers says very little about whether it reduces inequality – it certainly would to the extent it makes the population as a whole more productive and expands the cohort of citizens who can accumulate and profit from owning capital assets.
I’m sorry, but this is just a basic admission that you don’t know what inequality is. Inequality is not synonymous with a lack of social mobility. At all. You are confusing those two ideas and it’s ruining your own analysis. By definition, those things that increase the relative advantage of winners and disadvantage of losers inherently increase inequality, regardless of the absolute position of everyone.
Seriously, please Google about the difference between inequality and social mobility before you continue this conversation.
Finally, you seem to imply that education does not raise all boats equally – that the wealthy would benefit more than the poor, and education therefore increases inequality. This of course makes sense, but contradicts your “exact point” that inequality would increase as the small village kids surpass the big farmers’.
Again: I am making two separate claims about Leonhardt’s argument, as I keep telling you. One is to say that it would not address inequality if it worked, and the other is to say that it won’t work, anyhow. You are simply wrong if you think these stances are contradictory.
though you hint at this in your original post with your SAT/CLA graph, this says little to nothing about whether education helps the poor catch up to the wealthy unless you can show that the less-well-prepared students are also the poorest. While this makes intuitive sense and may well be so your graph does not make this point without more evidence of such a correlation.
That educational outcomes are positively and very strongly correlated with parental and personal income is one of the most robustly confirmed outcomes in the history of educational research. I assume that anyone who cares enough about these issues to read this blog knows that.
expanding the middle class by increasing productivity among the heretofore poor
Again, as the already middle class and rich outperform the poor educationally, the poor do not move into the middle class. As you are aware, the last forty years have seen the hollowing out of the American middle class, at the exact same time that we have dramatically increased our percentage of college graduates.
expanded willingness to act collectively and redistribute.
I might buy that, sure. But that would only be a reduction in inequality via education in a roundabout way. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it seems much more direct to call for redistribution in the first place.
“The median charter school– and that’s what matters, when we’re talking about society-level changes, as Leonhardt is– remains indistinguishable, if not worse, than the median regular public school.”
No, it’s the median student that matters, not the median school.
In my area, the weak charters have few students and the strong charters have many. It’s no surprise that, given a choice, parents prefer the superior charters.
Meanwhile, the local conventional public schools have similar numbers of students, regardless of their academic reputations.
And the median student performs essentially identically in a charter school as in a conventional public school, which contradicts the constant invocation of charters as the solution to our fake education crisis.
“And the median student performs essentially identically in a charter school as in a conventional public school, which contradicts the constant invocation of charters as the solution to our fake education crisis.”
Even if your assertion is correct–which I reject–charter schools are good policy because they achieve as much as conventional schools at lower cost per student.
Moreover, there is evidence that conventional public schools improve when they are faced with competition from charter schools. That’s another win-win for students and taxpayers.
It is not assertion, but rather the outcome of a large collection of rigorously conducted empirical studies. The notion that charter schools are universally cheaper is unproven, and anyway, as I said above, that is largely a function of their ability to exclude the hardest-to-educate students. That is the source of their advantage, the fact that the systematically and intentionally exclude the hardest to educate.
Also, this is moving the goal posts to an astonishing degree. The school reform movement has waged war on teachers, making their jobs far worse and ritualistically humiliating and disempowering them, under the theory that doing so would result in better outcomes for students. It hasn’t worked. Now, defenders of that war on teachers say, “well they’re just as good.”
Freddie, I guess I overestimated you.
Measuring the outcomes of charter vs. conventional schools is a devilishly complex task and you know as well as I that the studies are all over the map and yet, “It is not assertion.”
Meanwhile, basic accounting is “unproven”. (Although I must concede you used the hedge word “universally”.)
“The school reform movement has waged war on teachers.” The charter school teachers I know are happy to be there. So you and I have stumbled upon yet another reason to support charters.
In fact, charter school teachers quit at significantly higher rates:
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/09/07/should-the-high-teacher-turnover-rate-in-charter-schools-be-a-cause-for-concern/
“In fact, charter school teachers quit at significantly higher rates”
I’ll accept that as true. But it’s a distraction. The purpose of a school is to educate children–not to employ teachers.
Neither you nor I know the optimal turnover rate for a given school or city or field of study.
Also, this is moving the goal posts to an astonishing degree. The school reform movement has waged war on teachers, making their jobs far worse and ritualistically humiliating and disempowering them, under the theory that doing so would result in better outcomes for students. It hasn’t worked. Now, defenders of that war on teachers say, “well they’re just as good.”
This is such a huge issue. Back in the 90s, it was axiomatic that public schools sucked, and KIPP was lionized for showing how easy it was to get increases. Then the research started to roll in, and it turned out that controlling for everything, KIPP barely gets a fraction of a standard deviation, and that’s after teaching for hours more a day, ruthless discipline, and kicking out the unmotivated.
So now they change the goalposts–look, we’re just as good and sometimes better! Plus, cheaper! And then you point out that they’re cheaper because they don’t have the expensive kids, and because they have far cheaper teachers who start at cheap and quit to go to better paying public schools (the ones that don’t leave teaching entirely).
And it’s so incredibly clear that not only won’t charters scale, but that they simply couldn’t exist without public schools taking up the slack of kids and creating the constant job for teachers that charters won’t and can’t do.
Because yes, one of the purposes of schools is to employ teachers. If we don’t employ teachers, if we don’t have a stable occupation that attracts smart people (and yes, teachers are more than smart enough http://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/teacher-quality-pseudofacts-part-ii/), then public education doesn’t work. People who think otherwise are the ones who simply can’t conceive of how enormous the occupation is, and how the single biggest item on most administrators wish list is not the ability to fire teachers, but the ability to easily hire good ones.
“The charter school teachers I know are happy to be there. ”
As he said, not for long. Don’t kid yourself. Charter school teachers who like teaching leave and go to public or private schools. Charter school teachers who like the job are very different from public school teachers. They’re ambitious, see teaching as a stepping stone to power. That’s fine, but it’s not a population that you can use to staff schools–or would even want to.
My, aren’t you full of yourself!
As it happens, I’m quite well aware of the difference between inequality and social mobility. I also understand, as you apparently do not, that it makes little sense to consider the two separately and in fact reduced social mobility contributes to inequality. If education increases social mobility it can help reduce inequality.
But let’s step back and take a look Leonhardt’s claim and your response. He outlined what he calls Piketty’s first law of inequality – that capital accumulation allows the wealthy to make investments those without capital cannot afford and this in turn to expand the gap between both their annual incomes and their accumulated wealth relative to that of those who depend on labor income for subsistence. After lamenting the fact that true redistribution is politically unlikely, he suggests that education can equip the poor to close the wealth gap by increasing their productivity (incomes) and accumulating wealth of their own with which to make investments and catch up. To the extent this “first law” is true, and that education makes workers more productive, he has a case. In any event, he does not claim that this would solve the inequality issue or that we can “educate our way out of our [unspecified by you] economic problems.”
Nevertheless you attack these straw men by claiming that education actually increases inequality. You do this by making contradictory claims. First, you argue that educating the small village (poor) kids would create inequality with respect to the big farmers’ (wealthy) children:
You characterize this claim as pointing out that “this would not address inequality if it worked.” And of course if the big farmers’ kids ignored education and allowed the small village kids to surpass them and reverse the roles (rather than simply leveling the field) then you may have a point. But this does not happen in the real world, and you say nothing at all about whether it would work in Leonhardt’s meaning by expanding the number of people who can make capital as well as labor investments. You could of course attack Leonhardt’s claim by making a case that education does not make the poor more productive or equip the poor to make capital as well as labor investments – that it would not help with Piketty’s first law – but you don’t.
Second, you argue that “it won’t work, anyhow” by claiming that we cannot possibly educate everyone equally and if we did it would reduce the advantage education confers. Of course, whether a general system of broad education benefits everyone equally isn’t really relevant to Leonhardt’s claim – what matters is whether this education system improves general productivity (increases incomes among the poor) and equips some cohort of the population to make capital as well as labor investments. Because, you see, it makes no difference whether you define “inequality” as “too much wealth in too few hands” or “the highest incomes are much larger than the smallest incomes.” Expanding the cohort of the population that owns capital and can make investments helps with the first and increasing incomes through education by making people more productive helps with the second.
And, by the way, in the course of explaining why Leonhardt’s dream won’t come true you contradict your claim that it wouldn’t work even if it did.
I get it: you prefer to address growing inequality by simply taking money from the wealthy and give it to the poor. Fair enough, but good luck getting that policy through the House (or past any of our corporate shill politicians, for that matter). A more politically realistic approach, as Leonhardt points out, would be to tax the wealthy for a collective effort to improve productivity (and social mobility) through education. This would of course not “solve” inequality, and no one claims that it would. But it would help, and it’s far more politically achievable than redistribution on the scale needed to even the wealth gap.
If you disagree with this last statement it’s you thinking magically, not Leonhardt.
“But it would help”
Leaving aside the politically realism of this genius plan, it would help achieve what exactly? To ensure that plutocrats are chosen by merit, that is: greedier, cannier, more psychotic and ruthless than ever?
Great post.
The other thing is that improving education is hard. And redistribution is easy and effective.
People need to admit that the US education system is about as good as it is going to be. But people like to pretend that the most productive country in the world has a defective but easily fixable education system.