Theodore William Schultz (April 30, 1902 – February 26, 1998) was the 1979 winner (jointly with William Arthur Lewis) of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
He was born in Arlington, South Dakota, enrolled in South Dakota State College in 1921 to study agriculture, graduated in 1927, then entered the University of Wisconsin–Madison earning his doctorate in Agricultural Economics in 1930. [1]
He taught at Iowa State College from 1930 to 1943, and then moved to the University of Chicago. He later became president of the American Economic Association. He died in Evanston, Illinois in 1998.
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Schultz was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in development economics, focusing on the economics of agriculture. He analysed the role of agriculture within the economy, and his work has had far reaching implications on industrialisation policy, both in developing and developed nations. Schultz also promulgated the idea of educational capital, an offshoot of the concept of human capital, relating specifically to the investments made in education.
Schultz researched into why post-World War II Germany and Japan recovered, at almost miraculous speeds from the widespread devastation. Contrast this with the United Kingdom which was still rationing food long after the war. His conclusion was that the speed of recovery was due to a healthy and highly educated population; education makes people productive and good healthcare keeps the education investment around and able to produce. One of his main contributions was later called Human Capital Theory, and inspired a lot of work in international development in the 1980s, motivating investments in vocational and technical education by Bretton Woods system International Financial Institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
The dominant social thought shapes the institutionalized order of society...and the malfunctioning of established institutions in turn alters social thought. -- Theodore W. Schultz (1977)[2]
Most people in the world are poor. If we knew the economy of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matter.[3]
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