Education as the critical problem behind inequality

Instead of only linking to this great NY Times piece that many of my readers can't get without going through the free online subscription process, I'm going to link to a great blog post that talks about the article. The great post can be found here from the guys at Marginal Revolution.

A telling excerpt:

Income distribution thus depends on the balance between technological progress and access to college and postgraduate study. The problem isn’t so much capitalism as it is that American lower education does not prepare enough people to receive gains from American higher education.

Bottlenecks currently keep more individuals from improving their education. Professor Katz has suggested changes at multiple levels, including additional college aid, more-accessible community colleges, easier financial aid forms, more serious attempts to identify and retain top teachers in high schools and school voucher experiments.

It doesn’t suffice simply to increase the number of people in college; rather the new students must be prepared to learn. There is, however, no single magic bullet.