Traditionally, broader human capital skills have been associated with higher education, and, accordingly, the demand for college-trained workers has been increasing rapidly. The result is that, over the past 15 years, a wide gap has opened up between the earnings of college graduates and those of workers who stopped their formal schooling with a high-school diploma or less.
This explanation has emphasized a favorable relative return on U.S. investment, coupled with increased foreign willingness to hold dollar assets, as causal factors driving the United States’ growing current account deficit and low national saving rate. But causation may in part also have run from structural influences that contributed to reduced U.S. saving.