A brief aside from a very entertaining 2006 profile of Kevin Murphy, widely regarded as one of the most brilliant American economists of all time:

What’s becoming clear, however, is that education does more than boost income, says Murphy. It “improves people’s outcomes in a lot of other dimensions.” Again, health is a good example—educated people live longer—but there are also benefits “on the consumption-good side.” As more people get educated, the marketplace responds by catering to them. The product mix shifts toward items that appeal to educated consumers—Blackberries, digital cameras, Freakonomics—which makes it even worse to be less educated because not only do they have less money but the stuff they can buy is drifting away from them.

This reminded me of the notion that consumer surplus is distributed unevenly across individuals. We’re living in a era that is very friendly to autodidacts and people who enjoy unstructured leisure time. Other people are, relatively speaking, having a harder time.