Thomas Piketty's (2014) book, Capital in the 21st Century, follows in the tradition of the great classical economists, like Marx and Ricardo, in formulating general laws of capitalism to diagnose and predict the dynamics of inequality. We argue that general economic laws are unhelpful as a guide...

This essay proposes a set of non-econometric tests using data on wage structure, school resource costs, public expenditures, taxes, and rates of return to explain anomalies in which richer political units deliver less education than poorer ones. Both the anomalies of education history, and its...

The persistent increase in spending on elementary and secondary schools has gone virtually undocumented and has received insufficient attention. Real expenditure per student increased at 3« percent per year over the entire period of 1890-1990. A decomposition of the spending growth shows that...