Conventional wisdom is that greater schooling and skill improvement leads to higher wages and income inequality falls with wider access to schooling. Yet, since the early 1970s, inequality climbed, while educational attainment and worker skills gained and dispersion in schooling levels...

The U.S. economy has undergone major structural changes since 1950. First, there has been a gradual shift of employment from goods-producing industries to service-providing industries. Second, since the 1970s at least, the availability of new information-based technologies has made possible...