INTRODUCTION

The previous chapter has shown how the capitalist imperative on cities that dictates to attract an elite of high-skilled workers as a way to boost their economies ends up devaluing the majority of workers who are supposed to be low-skilled according to conventional parameters of labour-value measurement. This conventional view stems from the so-called “skill-biased technical change” thesis, an economic theory that has become commonsensical in mainstream analyses of the impact of the information technology “revolution” on labour and the economy. This view is premised on the assumption that the influx of highly skilled workers is crucial to a local economy and therefore also to local labour markets. Accordingly, the increase of highly paid knowledge workers is thought to be functional to the development of the consumption-based service economy.

The emphasis that is placed today on the measurement of knowledge and skills as an alleged parameter for the productivity of labour is derived from the economic theory of human capital, which traces its origins back to the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when it was first proposed by the Chicago School economists. Since then, human capital has become one of the most influential concepts in economics and the wider social sci-ences concerned with education, learning and more generally with the investigation of knowledge-based societies, such as sociology, pedagogy and management studies. Simultaneously, the human capital approach has become highly influential in policy-making in both the Global North and the Global South. However, compared with policy ideas and recipes commonly associated with neoliberalism and its more distinctive eco-nomic policies (such as monetarism, tax cuts and tariff rebates, labour flexibility, privatization of state-owned enterprises, attraction of foreign direct investment, export-led growth), the theory of human capital has not received equal attention from a critical standpoint in urban studies, human geography and cognate fields.

This chapter, therefore, aims to explore in more depth the trajectory of human capital theory and its political and intellectual reception since the Second World War years up to now, as its influence has been decisive in the transitioning to today's techno-monopoly capitalism.