So the fact that dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became billionaires is due to increasing returns to education? (why did Zuck drop out? why isn't everyone getting Ph.D.s?)
How much of Mankiw's wealth is due to his education, and how much to the industry structure's ability to make people pay $233 for his textbook?
It should not be that hard to take income (or labor income) and regress against educational level and get a pretty good sense of how much inequality is related to educational achievement, and how returns to education have changed. My gut feeling is it explains some of it, but education has not that much to do with the vastly increasing income share of the top 1%. One man's 'stochastic' is another's 'uncorrelated'.
How much of Mankiw's wealth is due to his education, and how much to the industry structure's ability to make people pay $233 for his textbook?
http://crookedtimber.org/2011/11/04/occupy-greg-mankiw/
http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-N-Gregory-Mankiw/...
It should not be that hard to take income (or labor income) and regress against educational level and get a pretty good sense of how much inequality is related to educational achievement, and how returns to education have changed. My gut feeling is it explains some of it, but education has not that much to do with the vastly increasing income share of the top 1%. One man's 'stochastic' is another's 'uncorrelated'.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/inequality-trend...