Dr Smith and the moderns: Adam Smith and the development of human capital theory

Since its emergence in the late 1950s, human capital theory has frequently been presented as a consistent and natural development of some ideas contained in the work of several founding fathers of the discipline, particularly that of Adam Smith. The recent revival of human capital theory has strengthened the view that Smith was a forerunner in this field (Teixeira 2000). In this paper, we will investigate this phenomenon by focusing on the ways in which these thinkers utilized Smith’s analysis of education, a key component of any human capital theory.