Epstein Secrets

zero just as buildings do. Yoram Ben-Porath combined these ideas and more in a masterly life- cycle model published in 1967. We'll get to it soon. Schultz called the part of consumption exhausted in taste satisfaction “pure consumption”. The part invested in human capital was “pure investment”. I change

sses the baton to the next. Our investment horizon is the generation length. Its reciprocal, or one over that period, gives our time preference rate. Jevons also saw time preference as the reciprocal of the period of production, but did not connect that to the generation length. I adjust Petty’s estimate

realized, as it were, in his person. The conversion of some consumption into human capital was a favorite theme of Frank Knight a generation before Schultz. Only the rest is what Schultz called pure consumption eliminated from the economy in satisfying tastes. Becker added in 1964 that this investment mu

productive consumption theory developed from Malthus through Mill in 1848. It lapsed from attention with the marginalist revolution beginning with Jevons and Menger in 1871, ironically the year of publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man, because the marginalists treated explanations of tastes as irr

Bawerk and the Austrian school are underrated. The pantheon might have room for him. Am I being too tough on later economists? We should not forget Schultz and Ben- Porath. Schultz’ greatest achievement, unless Mincer beat him, was in spotlighting human depreciation. That left me to ask where this huge f

the two as intellectual equals. Mill seems a clear second, thanks to his superb paragraph on growth. The candidates for third seem well behind. Maybe Jevons or John Rae or Leon Walras. Time has not been kind to the teachings of Keynes. I would now rank his teacher Alfred Marshall higher. I like Myrdal’s m