These are *raw* notes...

Mission: convince us that the twentieth century was the human capital century.

• The result of late-nineteenth century shifts that increased the value of formal decuation
• The U.S. leads the way in education
  • The U.S. provides a new educational template, based on republican ideology, new world factor endowments, and egalitarianism.
    • U.S. twentieth-century education is
      • practical,
      • secular,
      • gender neutral,
      • locally financed,
      • egalitarian
    • U.S. twentieth-century education enabled mobility
      • economic
      • occupational
      • geographical
  • Back then there were American virtues and European vices.
    • Since there may have been an ideological reversal...

Focus tonight on the high school...

• In the mid nineteenth century, delegations to the United States focused on technology
• In 1900, delegations to the U.S. focused on education: "...the only assets of Massachusetts are its climate and its skilled labor..."
  • By 1900 what mattered was capital embodied in people.
  • Only the U.S. made the investment in education: the U.S. led the way in mass secondary and higher education.
    • Even today's very poor countries invest much more in educaiton than countries with equivalent incomes in the past.

A "New Economy" emerged in the early twentieth century:

• Demand-side shifts that increased the demand for skilled, literate, educated labor.
• Firms sought workers with general skills: workers who could... ...
  • ...read manuals,
  • ...use algebra,
  • ...do mechanical drawing,
  • ...and understand electricity.

U.S. led in formal schooling in a very particular way:

• general not technical education;
  • universal egalitarian rather than tracking
  • hold people back rather than shift them onto a different educational path.
• The U.S. pioneered the general high school:
  • Europeans called this an incredibly wasteful system.
  • High geographic mobility and rapid technological change raise the value of general education
  • Kansans in 1915 demanded that schools educate rural children for geographic mobility.
    • Kansas and evolution today.

The high school movement.

• Laggards in high schooling included...
  • ...most of the big industrial city-heavy states,
  • ...and of course the south.
  • ...California's extraordinary recent educational failure...
• Local school districts important in the diffusion of high schools.

Return to high schol in in 1915: 12% per year

• Double the return in 1955
• Impact of high schoolization:
  • steep fall in inequality,
  • narrowing of education premium
    • (did the fall in inequality also come from the cutoff of immigration?)
• Wage structure a race between education and technology:
  • education wins the race 1910-1960,
  • technology wins the race 1960-2000

Bob Margo's introductory remarks:

"The harder one works, the luckier one gets" -- Bear Bryant

"The Economist as Detective"

Claudia Goldin trading cards