Time & Perspective Quote by William Vickrey

Vickrey’s line is an accounting argument disguised as a moral one: stop treating education like a recurring household bill and start treating it like infrastructure. “Nearly all” is doing strategic work here. He’s not defending every program in every budget; he’s trying to shift the default category. In public finance, calling something “capital outlay” changes the political weather. Capital spending feels like investment, patience, and seriousness; “expenditure” feels like indulgence and bloat. Vickrey is fighting that framing war.

The subtext is a rebuke to short-term austerity. If you label schooling as consumption, you invite annual panic and easy cuts when revenues wobble. If you label it capital, you justify borrowing, long horizons, and maintenance of capacity - the same logic used for bridges, power grids, and ports. Education, he implies, is a productive asset that depreciates if starved and compounds if maintained.

He also refuses the usual technocratic trap of reducing schooling to wages. The quote nods to “enhanced taxable income” because that’s the metric budget offices understand, but then he widens the ledger: “enhanced quality of life” belongs in the return column, too. That move isn’t sentimental; it’s tactical. It argues that public budgets already make non-monetized bets (parks, clean air, safety). Education deserves the same legitimacy, not a lesser status because its dividends are social, diffuse, and delayed.

Context matters: Vickrey, a leading economist of public finance, is pressing governments to use the tools of investment for human capital - and to stop pretending the future is someone else’s line item.