> [Education] does not guarantee that a person will end up in the top 1 percent, but it increases the likelihood. Only very slightly, which is the point that K

> [Education] does not guarantee that a person will end up in the top 1 percent, but it increases the likelihood. Only very slightly, which is the point that Krugman et al. are making. The main determinant of whether you, personally, are in the top 1% is whether your father was. > I have not seen any data on this, but I am willing to bet that the top 1 percent are more educated than the average American; while their education did not ensure their economic success, it played a role. Mankiw is doing what is called out in this article as bullshitting: http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/inequality_and_bullshit.html?mid=377924&rid=122578258 http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/inequality_and_bullshit... Mankiw is bullshitting. He is attempting to obfuscate a fact which he knows to be true, by throwing a bunch of other half-truths (of course education has some increasingly minimal effect on your life outcomes; that will always be true, it will still be true even when that effect is a hundredth of a percent) and seeing if any of them stick. Mankiw is fully aware that he's bullshitting. The purpose of his post is to give people who are already inclined to believe the whole thing is a "liberal plot" a handhold for their beliefs, a rope to grasp at. He knows it's fake, but if you WANT to believe that inequality isn't increasing due to a class of crooks running the U.S. for their own benefit, now you have something to hang your pre-existing belief on, courtesy of Mankiw. What an embarrassment.