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INEQUALITY IN AMERICA: WHAT ROLE FOR HUMAN CAPITAL POLICIES? edited by Benjamin M. Friedman. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 370 pp. $40.00.
Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? is the product of the third Alvin Hansen Symposium on Public Policy held at Harvard University in April 2002. Edited and introduced by Benjamin M. Friedman, a professor of political science at Harvard University, this book is structured in a way that preserves the character of the symposium. The first two chapters are separate arguments by Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, and James J. Heckman, the Nobel Laureate for Economics in 2000, who wrote with his then-doctoral student Pedro Carneiro. The third chapter consists of comments by five scholars: George J. Borjas, a professor of public policy at Harvard University; Eric Hanushek, an economist at the Hoover Institution; Lawrence F. Katz, a professor of economics at Harvard University; Lisa M. Lynch, a professor of international economic affairs at Tufts University; and Lawrence H. Summers, a professor of economics and president of Harvard University.
Subsequent chapters include Krueger's and Carneiro and Heckman's responses and rejoinders to each other and to the five discussants. This structure preserves the heated debate at the symposium. Participants addressed a question of great importance: How can widening economic inequality be improved through human capital policies such as education and training? As Friedman states in the introduction, there was a movement toward equality during the first few decades after World War II, but unfortunately this movement has been...