This book provides a careful historical analysis of the co-evolution of educational attainment and the wage structure in the United States through the twentieth century. The authors propose that the twentieth century was not only the American Century but also the Human Capital Century. That is, the American educational system is what made America the richest nation in the world. Its educational system had always been less elite than that of most European nations. By 1900 the U.S. had begun to educate its masses at the secondary level, not just in the primary schools that had remarkable success in the nineteenth century.

The book argues that technological change, education, and inequality have been involved in a kind of race. During the first eight decades of the twentieth century, the increase of educated workers was higher than the demand for them. This had the effect of boosting income for most people and lowering inequality. However, the reverse has been true since about 1980. This educational slow-down was accompanied by rising inequality. The authors discuss the complex reasons for this, and what might be done to ameliorate it.

A renowned economic historian traces women's journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach. Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed-and the barriers they faced-in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are "greedy," paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women's advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic's silver lining. Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

A renowned economic historian traces women's journey to close the gender wage gap and sheds new light on the continued struggle to achieve equity between couples at home A century ago, it was a given that a woman with a college degree had to choose between having a career and a family. Today, there are more female college graduates than ever before, and more women want to have a career and family, yet challenges persist at work and at home. This book traces how generations of women have responded to the problem of balancing career and family as the twentieth century experienced a sea change in gender equality, revealing why true equity for dual career couples remains frustratingly out of reach. Drawing on decades of her own groundbreaking research, Claudia Goldin provides a fresh, in-depth look at the diverse experiences of college-educated women from the 1900s to today, examining the aspirations they formed-and the barriers they faced-in terms of career, job, marriage, and children. She shows how many professions are "greedy," paying disproportionately more for long hours and weekend work, and how this perpetuates disparities between women and men. Goldin demonstrates how the era of COVID-19 has severely hindered women's advancement, yet how the growth of remote and flexible work may be the pandemic's silver lining. Antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, while valuable, are not enough. Career and Family explains why we must make fundamental changes to the way we work and how we value caregiving if we are ever to achieve gender equality and couple equity.

Gives permanence and context to Gallman's influential economic research on growth theory. When we think about history, we often think about people, events, ideas, and revolutions, but what about the numbers? What do the data tell us about what was, what is, and how things changed over time? Economist Robert E. Gallman (1926-98) gathered extensive data on US capital stock and created a legacy that has, until now, been difficult for researchers to access and appraise in its entirety. Gallman measured American capital stock from a range of perspectives, viewing it as the accumulation of income saved and invested, and as an input into the production process. He used the level and change in the capital stock as proxy measures for long-run economic performance. Analyzing data in this way from the end of the US colonial period to the turn of the twentieth century, Gallman placed our knowledge of the long nineteenth century-the period during which the United States began to experience per capita income growth and became a global economic leader-on a strong empirical foundation. Gallman's research was painstaking and his analysis meticulous, but he did not publish the material backing to his findings in his lifetime. Here Paul W. Rhode completes this project, giving permanence to a great economist's insights and craftsmanship. Gallman's data speak to the role of capital in the economy, which lies at the heart of many of the most pressing issues today.