When Claudia Goldin was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics for her research into gender, labor markets, and education, we were yet again reminded that historical perspectives can be highly valued outside the disciplines of history. Goldin’s success, combined with her interest in the history of US primary and secondary education, makes her research a useful starting point for a discussion on how history of education may continue to develop its position in the humanities as well as the social sciences. While the structure of the Nobel Prize-awarding institutions is stacked against us, historians of education may nevertheless benefit from reflecting on why Goldin won that prestigious award.
Goldin is herself a great promoter of historical research. Discussing the Nobel Prize of two fellow economic historians, Robert Fogel and Douglass North, she argued that history is essential to economics for several reasons. First, historical research is key because it is dangerous to base general conclusions on transient current phenomena. History can provide the researcher with larger datasets and longer time series, which allows for more reliable conclusions. Second, firm knowledge of our past may provide insights into experiences that may be useful for present-day policy. Third, the past remains important for the present in how it continues to shape structures, institutions, laws, and the actions of individuals. As a result, Goldin claims that “only the oblivious can ignore history in modern economics, and only the unenlightened would choose to do so.”Footnote 1
Theoretical, Empirical, and Methodological Contributions
While Goldin’s remarkable research is based on historical investigations, any assessment of her work must stress its broader implications. Daron Acemoğlu—a leading US economist of his generation—and his coauthor David Autor point to Goldin’s theoretical contributions to the discipline of economics. Discussing Goldin’s and Lawrence Katz’s book The Race between Education and Technology (2008), Acemoğlu and Autor argue that its massive value lies in how it contributes to the discussion initiated by Gary Becker’s Human Capital (1964), which provided a framework that still shapes economists’ and policymakers’ thinking about education.
According to Acemoğlu and Autor, Goldin and Katz’s book develops the concept of human capital in the twentieth century through four core arguments. These are (1) that the massive expansion of human capital in the US is linked to the social, economic, and political features of early twentieth-century America. In the twentieth century, human capital has become a key driver of (2) economic growth and (3) a decrease in inequality. As a result, Goldin and Katz argue (4) that the challenges facing the US today are linked to the problems facing US educational institutions.Footnote 2 Acemoğlu and Autor consequently praise this book as “a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the twentieth century.”Footnote 3
While Acemoğlu and Autor rightly highlight how Goldin’s scholarship revises our theoretical understanding of the (today almost unavoidable) concept of human capital, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stresses Goldin’s empirical research on gender. The Academy notes that she has “provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labor market participation through the centuries.” It also underscores Goldin’s argument for why the gender gap in earnings has persisted, despite modernization and economic growth, thereby highlighting the importance of education and occupational choices. The gender gap is closing so slowly, she explains, because educational decisions are made at a young age, yet determine a lifetime of opportunities or lack thereof.Footnote 4
Neither Acemoğlu and Autor, nor the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, neglects to mention Goldin’s historical methods. Acemoğlu and Autor note how Goldin supports her arguments with “compelling historical evidence,” and the Academy makes a similar observation. In their view, it was the collection and compilation of two hundred years of data that allowed her to uncover the key drivers of gender differences. Neither account of her research, however, focuses on her efforts as an economic historian per se. Instead, they praise the contribution that her historical research makes to human capital theory and gender differences in the labor market.
Conclusion
The story of Goldin’s Nobel Prize, told this way, may allow us to draw some conclusions regarding the role of history of education in science and research. Perhaps the most difficult lesson is that history of education must be written for a wider disciplinary audience. While I myself enjoy publishing articles that may only be of interest to historians of education, Goldin reminds us that our research must also deal with issues relevant to academia in general.Footnote 5 If Goldin merely had made contributions to a small subfield of labor economics or economic history of education, she would not have received so much attention both before and after her Nobel Prize. To put it another way: history of education cannot exclusively be written for its own sake; it needs to address seriously issues that are relevant to wider circles of educational researchers, sociologists, historians, and economic historians.
This approach does not only imply a certain interdisciplinary mindset, but also, as the Liam Neeson line (now a meme) goes, “a certain set of skills.” If we want history of education to play a more vital role in academia, we first need an in-depth understanding of the priorities and topics of other research fields. We need to master the terminology and theoretical concepts of broadly populated strands of the humanities and social sciences so that we can communicate with those research fields. Second, as Goldin’s research shows, we need to be able to use our historical methods to address the key problems that those strands address. That is, we need to learn how to apply historical methods to what are essentially nonhistorical problems.
In this sense, Goldin’s prize-winning research reminds us that our main challenge is not to persuade others of the relevance of the past. Her success does not rely on presenting original arguments for historical research. Instead, Goldin’s work indicates the importance of being able to use historical research to address issues in a way that other researchers cannot. If we, like Goldin, can provide new answers to key questions in the humanities and social sciences, our historical expertise will become the main argument for, and not against, our research field.
As a result, we might also be able to reach a more precise understanding of Goldin’s argument for historical research, mentioned earlier in the introduction. Goldin does not formulate an argument for the relevance of history in economic history, but for the value of history in modern economics. Similarly, I would claim, we should not argue for the value of the historical dimension of history of education, but should show the relevance and usefulness of historical perspectives within the wider disciplinary context of the humanities and social sciences.
Johannes Westberg is full professor of theory and history of education at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He has paid particular interest in the how’s and why’s of educational expansion, not least the rise of mass schooling during the nineteenth century. His publications include the monograph Funding the Rise of Mass Schooling (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and the recent conference issue “Rethinking the Social in the History of Education” in Paedagogica Historica (2023), edited together with Franziska Primus.
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