Human Capital and Institutions: A Long-Run View

by Edited by David Eltis , Frank D. Lewis , Kenneth L. Sokoloff

• ISBN13: 9780521769587
• ISBN10: 0521769582
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-08-17
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Human Capital and Institutions is concerned with human capital in its many dimensions and brings to the fore the role of political, social, and economic institutions in human capital formation and economic growth. Written by leading economic historians, including pioneers in historical research on human capital, the chapters in this text offer a broad-based view of human capital in economic development. The issues they address range from nutrition in pre-modern societies to twentieth-century advances in medical care; from the social institutions that provided temporary relief to workers in the middle and lower ranges of the wage scale to the factors that affected the performance of those who reached the pinnacle in business and art; and from political systems that stifled the advance of literacy to those that promoted public and higher education. Just as human capital has been a key to economic growth, so has the emergence of appropriate institutions been a key to the growth of human capital.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Health and Living Standards

Biotechnology and the burden of age-related diseases

Extending the reach of anthropometric history to the distant past

Insecurity, safety nets, and self-help in Victorian and Edwardian England

Institutions and Schooling

The evolution of schooling institutions in the Americas, 1800-1925

Why the United States led in education: lessons from secondary school expansion, 1910 to 1940

The production of engineers in New York colleges and universities, 1800-1950: some new data

Human Capital Outliers

The life-cycle of great artists from Masaccio to Jasper

An elite minority: Jews among the richest 400 Americans

Constraints in Labor and Financial

Suffrage and the terms of labor

Prodigals and projectors: an economic history of usury laws in the United States from colonial times to 1900

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