In his new book, David Harvey lambasts the “theory” of human capital, which underpins much of the contemporary thinking on the “value” of education in society:

To be sure, skilled and highly trained labour might reasonably expect a higher rate of remuneration than unskilled labour, but that is a far cry from accepting the idea that the higher wage is a form of profit on the workers’ investment in their own education and skills. The problem, as Marx pointed out in his acerbic criticism of Adam Smith, is that the worker can only realise the higher value of those skills by working for capital under conditions of exploitation such that it is, in the end, capital and not the worker that reaps the benefit from the higher productivity of labour. In recent times, for example, worker productivity has surged but the share of output going to labour has declined, not increased. In any case, if what the worker truly possessed in bodily form was capital, Marx pointed out, then he or she would be entitled to sit back and just live off the interest of his or her capital without doing a single day’s work (capital as a property relation always has that option at hand). As far as I can tell, the main point of the revival of human capital theory, at the hands of Gary Becker in the 1960s, for example, was to bury the significance of the class relation between capital and labour and make it seem as if we are all just capitalists earning different rates of return on capital (human or otherwise). If labour was getting very low wages, it could then be argued that this was simply a reflection of the fact that workers had not invested enough effort in building up their human capital! It was, in short, their fault if they were low-paid. Hardly surprisingly, all the major institutions of capital, from economics departments to the World Bank and the IMF, wholeheartedly embraced this theoretical fiction for ideological and certainly not for sound intellectual reasons. (p. 180)