ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 investigated the reidentification problem in connection with Becker’s time allocation model of the individual. Becker’s model is important, both because of the influence that human capital theory has in and outside economics and because human capital theory provides one of the few accounts in neoclassical or mainstream economics that explicitly raises the issue of how individuals are changed through time as a result of the actions they undertake. This latter feature of the model makes it possible to raise the reidentification problem for the atomistic conception, and to do so in a such way as to bring out important but largely unexamined assumptions regarding the nature of ability and the influence of education on individuals that underlie that conception. Chapter 3 argued that atomistic individuals are not successfully reidentified across change in the model because the assumptions about
ability and education that the model makes turn out to be implausible. In this chapter, the embedded individual conception is put to the same reidentification test in connection with the issue of how embedded individuals are changed through time as a result of the actions they take. This investigation asks whether there are unexamined assumptions in this conception that also fail to stand up to reasonable scrutiny, and that preclude the reidentification of socially embedded individuals.
