5 September 2007 at 3:22 am Nicolai Foss 4 comments
| Nicolai Foss |
He mails this: “Why did Ted Schultz, a Nobel winner, in his 1961 Presidential Address to the American Economic Association, “Investment in Human Capital,” not reference any of Solow’s work — for which, after all he too was awarded the Nobel?” A very good question!
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Peter G. Klein and Micheal E. Sykuta, eds., The Elgar Companion to Transaction Cost Economics (Edward Elgar, 2010).
Peter G. Klein, The Capitalist and the Entrepreneur: Essays on Organizations and Markets (Mises Institute, 2010).
Richard N. Langlois, The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism: Schumpeter, Chandler, and the New Economy (Routledge, 2007).
Nicolai J. Foss, Strategy, Economic Organization, and the Knowledge Economy: The Coordination of Firms and Resources (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Raghu Garud, Arun Kumaraswamy, and Richard N. Langlois, eds., Managing in the Modular Age: Architectures, Networks and Organizations (Blackwell, 2003).
Nicolai J. Foss and Peter G. Klein, eds., Entrepreneurship and the Firm: Austrian Perspectives on Economic Organization (Elgar, 2002).
1.
REW | 5 September 2007 at 3:30 pm
1. Why would a Chicago economist mention an MIT economist in a major address, especially the Nobel address?
2. Solow’s pre-1960 publications treated human capital in the way that Schultz argued that it should not — a homogeneous lump. My (sporadic) reading of Solow makes me think that his forays into human capital (quantity, quality, and distributions) came in the 1970s and later. Am I wrong?
2.
JC | 5 September 2007 at 11:03 pm
Well, in:
Solow, R. M. (1957). Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function. Review of Economics and Statistics, 39(3), 312-320.
the footnotes (p.312 and p.317) imply good relations between Solow and Schultz. Indeed Solow writes “I owe to T. W. Schultz a heightened awareness that a lot of what appears as shifts in the production function must represent improvement in the quality of the labor input, and therefore a result of real capital formation of an important kind”.
At the same time Kendrick’s work:
Kendrick, J. W. (1956). Productivity Trends: Capital and Labor. Review of Economics and Statistics, 38(3), 248-257.
in which he refers to the ‘cultural’ or immaterial’ capital (p.251) individuals ‘accumulated through investment and research’ was already widely appreciated – in 1969 Kendrick estimated that over 50% of the US’s ‘capital stock’ was of this type.
3.
JC | 5 September 2007 at 11:20 pm
Incidentally, Schultz’s address was his AES Presidential Address, not his Nobel address – which he gave in 1979.
4.
JC | 6 September 2007 at 8:38 pm
OOPS typo – AEA not AES.