Inventing Human Capital: Work, Education, and the Labor Market

Although human capital ideas have long animated public and policy discourse about education, training, employment, debt, skills, family structures, migration, and healthcare, our understanding of the origins of this framework remain somewhat limited.

Historians of the period have thus far treated human capital theory as a phenomenon that appears almost exclusively in the work of Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, Jacob Mincer, and other neoclassical, Chicago School economists. Economists, meanwhile, often take the term for granted, further cementing and naturalizing the idea that human labor can be treated as either a natural resource or a site of investment. By asking how and why economists, public officials, professional managers, and others come to conceive of labor as a form of capital over the course of the twentieth century, participants in this conference will be encouraged to consider the “longer history” of human capital and the many different social, political, and economic currents of thought that fed into it.

Perhaps the most far-reaching consequence of the "human capital revolution" can be observed in the way that contemporary policymakers imagine the causes of inequality. In particular, the oft-cited claim that the persistence of income inequality is the result of a "skills gap" in the labor market (or, in Becker's vocabulary, an underinvestment in human capital) has encouraged policymakers to frame the expansion of higher education, funded largely by student debt, as the most appropriate solution. This conference will therefore also provide a platform for empirically-grounded research that critically assesses the impact of human capital-oriented policies and considers alternative theories of the labor market.