Human capital

Gary Becker (1930–2014)
Nobel laureate (economic science, 1992)
University of Chicago

“I tell you what it does take: it takes a clear mind.”

Jackson Browne, Running on Empty, 1977

Certainly not the first word on the subject and clearly not the last, just the best.

Described by leading educational economist and renowned economic historian Mark Blaug as "the leading theoretical work on this subject" (Sweetland, 1996)

In the UK, as elsewhere, funding of tertiary education is poorly conceived, even more poorly considered and, as a result, a horrendous and inequitable mess that fails abjectly to achieve any of its reasonably inferred objectives, instead saddling a generation with debt that is, in effect, a massively regressive impost that inhibits social mobility.

We need a more economically defensible, reasoned approach to funding tertiary education.

What would it mean to take human capital theory seriously? Is it useful as a practical instrument of policy? If so, what would it mean? What would a policy predicated on investment in human capital look like? How would it handle the marginal public denefit (MPB) of education? Is there a MPB (i.e. spillover benefit) from tertiary education? Does it matter?

To answer these questions, we must also address the old J.H. Newman question: What is a university? Also, what is the value of unproductive knowledge?