PERSON
Gary Becker
The economist who gave human beings a balance sheet—treating education, skill, and judgment as capital with rates of return, depreciation schedules, and the logic of opportunity cost—and whose framework predicts, with uncomfortable precision, every response to the AI transition he never lived to witness.
Gary Becker’s 1964 book
Human Capital did something no economist had done before: it treated the years a medical student spends in residency, the hours a developer spends debugging, the decades a lawyer spends building expertise as capital—assets that generate returns, depreciate, become obsolete, and require maintenance exactly as physical capital does. The distinction matters because capital has properties that consumption does not. Capital can be rendered worthless by a change in the environment that makes its specific form of scarcity abundant. Becker died on May 3, 2014, and never saw the machines learn to speak human language. But his framework predicts, with the quiet accuracy that characterized all his best work, every behavior the AI transition has produced: the
rational flight to the woods of senior engineers who have correctly identified the depreciation of their specific expertise; the fighters who have correctly identified the appreciation of
general human capital when execution