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Hello welcome we are on the air with another edition of it’s not that simple today we’re going to focus on human capital we’ll talk about how valuable we as humans are in the labor market how we have evolved and really what are the keys that will contribute to our success
In the future we’re going to do this we’re going to discuss this topic with Nobel prize-winning American Economist James Heckman James who also holds a variety of roles senior roles at the University of Chicago in the economics department is going to share his insight and expertise on this topic James is
Also the director of the center for the economics of human development and director of human capital and Economic Opportunity at the global working group so James thank you so much for joining us on this program I’m really looking forward to our conversation I think to kick off our discussion it’d be really
Valuable if you could share your definition of human capital and taking into account your experience why it’s such a fascinating topic to to to discuss well human capital really is a term that’s used very broadly uh and it’s not a single item it’s really you can think
Of it as human skills and the emphasis is human of course and the other component of it is skill which means that these are aspects of our our capacities to perform that can be shaped by our actions whether it’s schools whether it’s training our children whether it’s our own activities engaging
The world there are a lot of ways to shape human capital and there are a lot of Dimensions to human capital so people have thought about you know skills in the workplace like you’re saying but also the capacity to deal with others the capacity to uh and control one’s
Life the capacity to be able to engage in a series of constructive activities so in that sense human capital is a capacity but it’s a as a set of capacities which allow us to function well in the world we’re going to hopefully get into a few of those dimensions of human capital
During our conversation to get things going and looking at at this topic from a historical standpoint among your many contributions to the study of Labor and and human capital that is the the demonstration that the promotion of civil rights in 1964 had a positive impact on economic progress uh would you
Like to expand on that well when I was working on this paper it’s been a while now but uh yes this this line of work there was a body of Thinking Inside economics that uh denied the capacity of legislation and regulation to promote the well-being of different social and economic groups and
So the idea was regulation per se was harmful or would never really allow for human uh flourishing so the idea that I actually was engaged with was that was showing that in fact in the 1960s when African-American progress was very substantial in the United States and there’s no denying that it was
Substantial that a lot of factors were going on blacks had been going into schooling at a much higher rate starting in the 1930s and 40s so that was a phenomenon that had been pre-existing before the 1960s there was also a war the war on in Vietnam which tightened
The American economy and made labor markets very much much tighter and a typical phenomenon in that period is that minority groups and groups that have been excluded are very much more likely to be brought into the labor force so there was this question of whether it was the war in Vietnam that
Promoted black progress but I also at this time Lyndon Johnson and the whole Senate U.S Senate passed what was called a series of civil rights laws this governed not only the workplace but it governed also the way that restaurants and hotels and a number of other organizations treated African Americans
And so my goal was to try to look among these competing explanations some were secular factors that were going in a very smooth way but what I also found was that there was a very sudden jump after the 64 Civil Rights Act and we got data from at one time in the United
States segregation codes were such that literally firms had to report what percentage of their Workforce was black what percentage was white and so we could use those records to see a very dramatic jump that occurred around the time of a passage in enactment of the civil rights law and so what we found
Was that civil rights played a very important role in advancing African Americans and the law the law of civil rights it wasn’t just the general social protest but it was also literally the law itself and the law was targeted towards the Southern United States and that’s where most of the progress was
Made the reason why also was important to talk about this period in the United States is that obviously throughout the past decades there’s been an increase in in labor rights civil rights in in the U.S the same can be said about many Western countries in in Western Europe however there are certain superpowers
Right now such as China India and some countries in the Middle East that actually have resisted to give more civil and labor rights and are being still quite successful from an industrial perspective so how have you seen the emergence of the success of some of these states
Without the the kind of civil and labor rights that we’ve seen in the western world well you got to be really careful about China in that regard because in the 1949 Revolution uh you saw a very rapid change in the status of women and so what you saw was previously
Chinese culture traditional culture excluded women from the workplace really women were going to education uh women were not doing a lot of things in the traditional society and when 1949 came along there was full equality mandated by the state this happened earlier in Russia in the 1920s
It happened in Cuba in the 1960s and it’s happened in many and in Vietnam later in the 1970s so like it or not one of the benefits of communist revolutions has been that it’s provided education and provided much greater participation in society than in traditional role so I
Do want a sort of question your statement that somehow China is not practicing civil rights in this broad sense India is a different issue completely I agree Indy has these traditional caste system and it’s really not a single country it’s a collection of provinces with different cultural traditions and I don’t think there’s
Been a uniform policy applied and I think the current leader of India was his emphasis on Hindu culture and Hindu uh dominance has created somewhat of a jarring situation where the Muslims and other minorities have been somewhat put at a disadvantage so I’ll be I’d like to qualify that remark okay
I I understand that I I I uh I meant that from a democratic standpoint in the labor market obviously there were different models uh that are practiced in in the U.S than there are in in China and the way the workforce is uh but this is something this is something that I’m
From the University of Chicago and of course Milton Friedman is most often Associated correctly with Chicago at least in the period 1950 to our other period of the late 70s early 80s and his books were very influential and one of the principles that Friedman tried to emphasize and many of his followers have
Emphasized is that the structure of uh Liberty in the Democratic sense democracy is really important for economic success and vice versa that a free market system will promote a democracy and yet in his last years when he was celebrating his 90th birthday or so we had a celebration in his honor
Here at the University of Chicago and I asked him this very question at the one of these you know a session not dissimilar to what we’re doing right now and I I said well do you still believe that democracy and Democrat and economic growth really are are early paired in
The way that you thought so 20 30 years ago and he said no it’s not true partly because China was already developing and secondly it was because Hong Kong so there were a lot of examples Singapore too which is hardly at that at that time a very Democratic place
Nonetheless showed a lot of prosperity so I think generally speaking these are separate matters I think uh Democratic Society does allow correction of the excesses that a totalitarian system for example I’m 100 sure that if China were a full democracy the shutdowns in the economy would never
Have been tolerated and you know this goes back many many years uh the famous Indian Famine of the 1940s is an example where uh India at the time was a British colony hardly a democracy and there was a famine that was allowed and that probably was a failure of State in the
Sense the state functioning of uh was just not permitted so democracies open up and they allow dissent and they allowed change in a way but I don’t think it’s one to one I don’t think it’s necessary to have a democracy to have a successful technological uh invention and they’re
Probably examples in world history you look at Japan Japan in the late 19 uh late 19th century uh when basically it opened itself to technology it was still a feudal State more or less centralized now but uh and so no democracy but it created a very powerful military and
Industrial complex so so I think the two were separated we need to separate those okay I appreciate your uh your insights on that I wanted to talk about another topic that you’ve you’ve studied extensively which is the the impact of inequality on school on skill acquisition
Um and and how how doomed the poor are to be stuck in in a circle of poverty because of the opportunities or lack thereof of acquiring skills um how do you assess the equality or inequality in the labor market at the moment and the opportunities to
Progress in in in in in in careers as opposed to uh uh what we’ve seen in in maybe a more distant past well if you were to talk about inequality in the United States which is probably where I should keep my uh opinions sure since I’ve researched
The data but I’m I’ve also been working in Denmark and other Nordic countries so it’s not complete not a completely black box for me but the one thing that’s really been discussed and is a new finding it’s a new dimension to the discussion of inequality is that in American politics certain
Parties in particularly the Democratic party and many other populist groups have emphasized the growth of inequality and the fact that this is that the the ratio of the income of the top to the bottom has grown and that we somehow much less equal Society the reason why that’s been disputed and
It is disputed it’s not that there isn’t a growth in inequality nobody denies that but the way that it’s been characterized people do for example the statistics that are put out by these there are two people ptd of course a European has looked a lot at the United States and Emmanuel zayaz
Who’s at Berkeley and others a guy named zuckman Gabrielle zuckman these people have done a lot of work trying to emphasize the growth and inequality and in some real sense they’ve shaped the discussion however what they’ve done is they’ve been using data that is very incomplete and let me explain why it’s
Incomplete they’re looking at family income so there are many different ways to measure inequality you could talk about wage inequality between two qualified individuals equally qualified or you can talk about income inequality for families and most of the discussion has been conducted for families so this would be children and parents together
And of course family structure itself has changed a lot over the last 30 40 years all around the world but family is the main mention that’s where the focus oecd and U.S and PKD and zayas what’s happened is true that in the labor market unskilled people have not done that well
So the earnings of unskilled people have not been that high and in fact we think now with the international the globalization of the labor market bringing China on board Vietnam and many of the other countries that are at used to be at The Fringe now are playing at
The center of the economy has really lowered the wage growth and even the real wage of some very unskilled workers no question about it however in the United States anyway the response has been to increase transfers so what used to be a society that was very stingy and transferring has now
Become a society that is actually very generous I’ll give you a sense of how generous it is if you look at the bottom 20 percentile of American income inequality a family income inequality the average earnings earnings of the people of families there would be a forty five hundred dollars a year a very
Low income wow but if you ask how much income do they receive not just from earnings but from transfer programs from a number of uh various kinds of social efforts to redistribute income that it turns out that their income is actually forty nine thousand dollars a year
So there’s more than 11 fold increase but it’s coming through transfers looking at at the the way in which uh American society has evolved throughout your lifetime and obviously when you look at at the United States and I lived there nine years and you always hear about the American dream and how
Everything is possible do you think that the American dream has it all uh changed uh shifted during your lifetime and how much harder is it to make it come true now than it was maybe 20 maybe 40 maybe 60 years ago well the question is for whom if you’re
An African-American 60 years ago the passage of civil rights laws the ability of individuals to transact and Society was enormously expand people are saying that our black status is like going back to slavery that’s complete nonsense if you look at the rapid change in African-American status in the last 60 years it’s tremendous
Positive and there’s no denying it I think the rest is just politics people are saying it’s not there if you ask about being a factory worker at an unskilled job where you’re competing with Chinese labor and a robot then no things are worse there’s no question about it
So it really depends on the kind of skill and the kind of person uh we look at immigrants who come to the United States and we see enormous gains success stories people coming from Nigeria from Vietnam uh and Latin America they open businesses they succeed very well because in American society there’s a
Lot of opportunity to try and experiment and rise out of traditional caste systems so I think it really depends on who the person is in the background there’s a lot of opportunity for people no question about it and I think even in terms of providing Educational Opportunity it’s very very hot people
Tell me what Pell Grants and so forth now I’m not saying there aren’t any problems I’m sure but somehow just because Trump was president or or Biden as president or something this creates a peculiar cast to individuals which I don’t think if you look at the fundamentals of the society I think the
Society is completely it changed in its openness just look at gay marriage gays were hiding 60 years ago now it’s open and nobody really cares in the sense of a majority and the fact that you get this these incidents these Salient incidents that get expanded by the press and by coverage
Does not really eliminate the fact that most Americans are very receptive the gay marriage proposition was support ordered by the vast majority of Americans and it’s just the sense that we really don’t want us control a lot so there’s been a big change in the opportunities for self-expression in the
United States some people say it’s gone too far but that’s a different point so I think there really is an opportunity up but if you’re talking about the upward mobility of a factory worker in Toledo Ohio whose main job was to assemble cars for Ford Motor then
Those jobs have dried up and they will continue to drift he continued where I am as robotization competition comes up yeah of course I wanted to get your take on the on the interaction between legal systems and human capital um because I know you’ve also studied that profoundly and written about it uh
Uh often as well is is the flexibilization of of the labor market in your view the right recipe or will it bring more precariousness and Injustice well I think got to be really careful something like the minimum wage and a lot of the regulations that are well intended
Are not fully understood in their consequences take the minimum wage there’s a paper a set of Papers written by David card and others uh Dubai and so forth claiming correctly by the way that when you raise the minimum wage the covered workers get higher wages that’s almost automatic
So what’s what’s missing in that analysis is something deeper which is what is the adjustment so literally if I lean on you or I tax you in some way if I put pressure on you in various ways where does the pressure go so when we pressure The Firm by saying
Imposing minimum wages the standard response of many people is oh you’re going to lay off workers because the price of Labor has gone up and that happens this happens more often than certain groups of people would admit but that’s not the only adjustment and maybe not even the largest adjustment
Recently it’s been studied both in the U.S and in Hungary that when you do this kind of change in the minimum wage these areas of uh these firms in particular usually service sector firms or firms that are doing things like retail McDonald’s for example or other companies that so that hires that’s uh
Persons um I have to adjust somehow and so one way they adjust in the fast food industry is by raising the price of the product so if the firm is paying more money he could get some more money for its product then it can compensate itself
For that loss and then if the firm is losing money down the road it’s much less likely to invest in that company in that line of activity to build firms and so forth and neither one of those adjustments is very well studied the first known about raising the price has
Been studied and in fact there’s a very important paper by a professor at Stanford who actually showed that yes you can increase the minimum wage yes you can get people who are actually very very uh very very uh much better off if they keep their job
But as a group because fast food is consumed on average more by poor people than by middle class or wealthy people that because the price has gone up the welfare of the poor has actually gone down they’re paying more for this product of fast food and so it’s it’s
Just the inability of people to see the economic system in the way that it adjusts that’s very troubling and you know like take rent control this is one of the most studied problems in America in at least in American economics back in the 30s and 40s New York City impose
Rent control San Francisco is very actively doing so and so what happens I’m a real I’m a landlord I bring in structure of uh agreeing at a restriction I can’t charge more I put all kinds of restrictions about getting rid of unruly renters or clients in
Various ways and so what happens then is that people pull out of that industry there’s less investment in building new apartments and people who manage apartments are more than willing to let them sit vacant so there’s a new study out recently in San Francisco pointing out there was something like sixty
Thousand San Francisco is a city that’s played by all kinds of problems uh in terms of Housing and a lot of homelessness going on the weather’s not so bad so people can live outside in a more comfortable way than they could in Chicago but nonetheless this whole issue
Has actually come and it’s actually creating a uh a huge uh problem in the sense that landlords and Builders are pulling out of that market just like in the fast food market they won’t go in if they have to pay much higher wages and so it’s those long run adjustments that
People are very very it’s very hard for many people to understand and the populist will only look immediately and say yep I raise the wage I’m making them better off then you ask well have I made a whole group of these people better off and in the long
Run I’ll be better off and those questions are almost never asked and when they are you see a really a highly qualified answer in the sense that the the initial enthusiasm when put against this initial this data and understanding the the consequences of the action tempers the enthusiasm to put it mildly
So the whole discussion I’m I mean I I so you’re asking the question generally about incentives and so I think what’s happened is that harder and harder it seems for many people certainly in American society but I know it’s true in Spanish Society I study a lot they work
In Latin America I did a fair amount of work on Latin America and looked at the job employment protection programs in Spain that were introduced some 30 years ago and what’s happened successfully uh is that yes people who get protected the Insiders gain but The Outsiders are excluded and it creates a two-sector
World which I think is very harmful for social mobility and inequality and for politics but so I think the structure of uh regulation is such that well-intentioned regulations sometimes can cause harm and it’s not understood and Advocates don’t seem to want to Think Through the issue that deeply
Because it’s so transparent it’s just whatever salience is you know a policeman kills a black man and suddenly this becomes a prototype for all of society when in fact it’s it’s basically one hundredth of one percent of the police black interactions and so this is
A typical this is a problem and I guess it’s magnified now by the social media which can blow these things up large circles of uh of uh of ignorance and I I think I think that the danger is not really looking at the whole body of evidence
So James in order to wrap up our conversation I have a few quick fire questions for you so okay one word yes yes so in one word or in a short sentence I’d like you to answer these knowing that obviously they could take a lot longer to explore but the first one
Is in your opinion what is one personality trait that a good leader could really benefit from having a political leader yes I think that would be openness to experience okay no the ability to learn from people to learn from situations what is the biggest challenge Humanity faces today in your view
The biggest challenge that humanity is a group faces is the great difficulty of being factually informed about social and economic policy and the unwillingness for people to be informed I I think that would actually be a topic for a show in itself uh I I think that’s that’s crucial um
Yeah yeah it’s it’s incredible if you could change one thing in the world today by Magic what would it be what I would well I’m going to follow up on my previous theme but if I were to change one thing I think I would ask people to at least
Weigh and measure more carefully what they hear and see before they reach judgments and conclusions that would be across the whole society the very poorest and the very wealthy final question what’s been the most important learning of your career if you take one thing from your career
What is that one thing that you you you would focus on that people need to know or that people need to know or that I have benefited from these are different that you have benefited from so therefore you want to share that that one learning well I would say there’s never been
Anything that I have learned that did not have long-term value for me and guide me not necessarily immediately but down the road so learning new things learning is powerful and it creates the openness to it creates the openness to a whole world of ideas and possibilities and that is particularly significant I
Think considering your vast experience and the years that you have exercised your your profession that you remain open to learning as you did maybe when you were at the start of your career so that that probably more so probably more so because I’m more aware of how ignorant I am
No no I just you you get to the boundaries of things and you realize holy moly I need to know more but that’s true in every field physics you know look at all the Dark Matter physics going on right now we know about what five percent of the universe so
Economics is not alone James it’s been an absolute pleasure and privilege to have an opportunity to uh uh have this conversation with you this discussion thank you so much for sharing your Insight your expertise and and continued success in your in your career and in your uh constant learning I would say
Okay well best of luck and uh enjoy talking with you so I hope it’s I hope this is successful for you thank you James an absolute pleasure to speak with James Heckman on this topic of human capital we explored that in general terms spoke about inequality talked about some of the challenges that
Are out there to progress in life and progress in the labor market and uh also address the the flexibilization of the labor market in itself it’s been another fascinating episode of It’s not that simple Thank you
4 comentários
Grande convidado! Quem faz a escolha?
Após a ascenção do neo liberalismo com Reagan e Tatcher a diferenças de rendas não para mde aumentar. Isso é um fato, não dá para dourar a pilula. PS lí os livros de Piketty e lá está tudo muito bem documentado.
Voces precisam convidar outros pensadores com visões diferentes do padrão U de Chicago. Alguém com visão mais proxima da esquerda e mesmo marxista.
Só um economista de Chicago poderia chamar seres humanos, pessoas com as assim chamadas "capacidades", enfim, nossos semelhantes, de "capital humano".