Daily Inspiration Quote by Theodore William Schultz

Schultz is doing something slyly radical: he takes the language of markets - "capital good", "investing" - and aims it at the most touchy object imaginable, the human person. He knows the provocation. To call a man a form of capital sounds like reducing a life to machinery, a moral downgrade disguised as a spreadsheet. Schultz flags that recoil up front ("may seem to debase him") and then pivots: the real measure of dignity, in a liberal society, is not poetic purity but expanded agency.

The intent is to rescue a controversial metaphor from its worst implications. In mid-20th-century economics, especially amid postwar reconstruction and Cold War arguments about freedom versus planning, "human capital" was a way to justify public and private spending on education, training, health, and mobility as productive investment rather than soft-hearted consumption. The subtext is political: if you can show that schooling and health raise output, you can defend them inside a policy world obsessed with growth, efficiency, and measurable returns.

But Schultz also slips in an ethical claim: investment in the self enlarges the "range of choice". That's a freedom argument, not just a productivity argument. He’s trying to bridge two moral languages that often clash - humanistic dignity and economic rationality - by saying the latter can be pressed into service of the former. The tension remains, deliberately: the metaphor courts commodification even as it promises liberation. Schultz is betting that in a society where budgets decide values, the surest way to protect the person is to make the person legible to power.