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| Current Issue |
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| Resources |
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Schools, Work, and Prosperity
| Article
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20002 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
2,506 Words |
| Author
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Eli Ginzberg
Eli Ginzberg is A. Barton Hepburn Professor Emeritus of
Economics and director of the Eisenhower Center for the
Conservation of Human Resources at Columbia University. |
This article draws heavily on my long-term involvement as researcher, writer, and government consultant concerned with human resources both in the United States and abroad. When I earned my doctorate in economics at Columbia University in 1934, the term human resources was not known, but the scourge of unemployment had devastated the United States, and the prosperity of 1929 was a rapidly fading recollection. A decade later, at the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939, the GNP in the United States was still below what it had been a decade earlier.
Another early marker: In the summer of 1939, I undertook my first field study of the long-term unemployed in the coal-mining areas of South Wales, the results of which were published by Harper & Row in 1942. The book was recently published by Transaction Press with a new title, A World Without Work: The Story of the Welsh Miners, with a new introduction in which I review the experiences of the United States and Great Britain in the postwar decades in seeking to avoid and respond to serious unemployment.
One of the important legacies of World War II was General Eisenhower's initiative as president of Columbia University in 1948 in establishing the Conservation of Human Resources Project (renamed the Eisenhower Center on the centennial of his birth in October 1990), which I direct, and where the staff has explored a great many different facets of the school-work-prosperity relationship over the last four decades, starting with Eisenhower's central concern of extracting the human resources lessons from the U.S. experience during World War II.
One more preliminary: In the 1950s and early 1960s, three prominent economists on the University of Chicago faculty, Theodore Schultz (who later won the Nobel Prize), Gary Becker, and Jacob Mincer, picking up a lead from Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall, began to elaborate the theory of human capital, in which they demonstrated that the opportunities that children and young people have to acquire education, knowledge, and work experience will determine their later earning and career progress. In the subsequent decades, the human capital analysts have produced a plethora of empirical studies that have established the close links that exist between the opportunities that individuals have to acquire knowledge and skills during their years of preparation and later in the labor force and the earnings that they are able to command.
But that relationship between human capital investment and return is far from certain. Black youngsters
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