In the late 1950s and 1960s, however, the concept of human capital was much more closely associated with the name of Theodore Schultz, an economist who worked alongside Friedman and Becker at the University of Chicago but who would be more accurately described as a neo-Keynesian of the likes of Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Richard Musgrave. It was Schultz who first popularized the idea that spending on human services such as education should be considered an investment rather than an act of consumption—and therefore that education itself should be considered a form of capital or interest-bearing asset.

Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, loc. 248