can go up or down. So falling prices create a spiral in which assets are sold off to repay debts, triggering further price falls and further sales. Irving Fisher, an economist who worked in the first half of the 20th century, called this the debt deflation trap. Another reason why debt matters is to do with t

as time-discounted future lifetime pay. Adam Smith in 1776 saw it equivalently as accumulated past investment in nurture and schooling. The Americans Irving Fisher and Frank Knight revived both ideas in the early 20" century. The tempo picked up after World War IJ at the University of Chicago. Jacob Mincer reder

sold as well as hired, is only the visible tip of the iceberg. The term human capital itself is touchy because it can suggest that life has a price. Irving Fisher used it in quotation marks in 1898}, attributing it to earlier sources | haven’t found, but not in his two great books on the topic in 19062 and 1907