According to Dale Jorgenson and Barbara Fraumeni, the value of human capital in the United States is five to ten times larger than the value of all the physical capital in the United States.24 Human capital has not always been this important to the economy. The great economist Adam Smith understood that one of the great drawbacks of the first machine age was the way it forced workers to do repetitive tasks. In 1776, he noted, “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to
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