Schultz justified public education funding on collective-growth grounds, not individual returns
Evidence
Schultz’s insights led him to a number of practical conclusions regarding the role of public investment in education. First, he reasoned that if haphazard investment in higher education had been responsible for such a large portion of national economic growth, then the federal government would be well advised to adopt an active policy of sustained investment in the sector. Second, he argued that selective underinvestment in the education of the working class, African Americans, and women could account for the labor market discrimination experienced by these demographics. Underinvestment in education was not only a source of economic, racial, and gender inequality; it was also a waste of national human resources that could have greatly increased GDP had they been deployed. When Friedman, commenting on one of Schultz’s drafts, asked him the critical question of whether returns to investment in education accrued primarily to the individual or the collective, Schultz replied that such investment raised national income and was therefore in the interests of the public as a whole. — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 250
Categorization
- XREF: Fractures the caricature that human-capital theory was purely individualistic — connects to the Chicago-school debates being mapped in this reading. — connects to: Human capital theory originally justified free public education as collective investment — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 250
- SEED: An article angle: how the founders of human-capital theory actually saw public provision as a social good, complicating later neoliberal attacks on public higher education.
Broader Connections
- Human capital theory originally justified free public education as collective investment
#corroborates(0.92) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 250