Human Capital, Growth and Inequality

Ken Mayhew

doi:10.18573/j.2016.10052

Abstract

Human Capital, Growth and Inequality

Highlights

The Portmeirion conference programme posed the following questions:“Which skills are most important – basic, soft or technical? How can an education or training system best foster them”?There are many reasons that a nation wants a well-educated and trained population
Brown, Lauder and Ashton (2011) argue that many managerial jobs have been massively deprived of discretion and analytical content by ICT developments, a phenomenon they describe as “digital Taylorism”
Over- and under-qualification is defined related to this modal level of education

Summary

Introduction

The Portmeirion conference programme posed the following questions:. “Which skills are most important – basic, soft or technical? How can an education or training system best foster them”?. This paper takes a deliberately narrow, instrumental perspective and examines the contribution of education and training to productivity and growth and to tackling problems of economic inequality. What do we know about the relationship between education and skills on the one hand, and productivity and economic growth on the other? First I discuss the relationship between human capital, productivity and economic growth and consider the attitudes of policy makers to this relationship. “There are those who caution against always crudely linking education to economic or workplace goals. He was quite correct to advise caution. A similar picture would emerge had I considered growth of GDP per capita and had I used alternative measures of educational attainment

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Notwithstanding such measurement difficulties it seems pretty clear that

Findings

Elementary occupations