Loose ends? Discussing human capital and the economic value of education in the first half of the twentieth century1

Abstract

Human capital has become a popular concept in modern economics since the 1960s, though its historiography is still limited. Prior studies focussed on rational reconstructions, using earlier references to provide legitimacy to modern developments. In this text we take a different approach by tracing the evolution of the term and the (dis)continuities in its use. We analyse various contexts in which education and human capital were discussed during the first half of the twentieth century. The analysis underlines the complex stabilisation of the concept human capital, the loose connections among earlier debates and between those debates and modern economics.