https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-cold-war-led-the-cia-to-promote-human-capital-theory"

This was an exceptionally good article. It was boring, but I kept reading, so it had to be good.

The ideas from the Cold War still with us.

Here is the condensed version as I read it twice and actually made notes for this post.

Although Schultz holds staunch neoclassical assumptions about growth and development, he learnt from his earlier studies of agricultural productivity that increased public spending on education was absolutely vital to the nation’s growth agenda. It will not only give the US a scientific edge in the space race but also enrich the country’s wider skill reserves, making it more productive and thus beating the Soviets at their own ‘growth game’.

Friedman abruptly interjects. Yes, he intones, the question of economic growth is vital. But public spending is not the way forward. It’s easy to picture Friedman browbeating his weary chairman once again about the evils of ‘big government’ and central planning. The Soviet enemy instead needs to be confronted on strictly US terms, where individual freedom and capitalist enterprise come to the fore. Government is the problem, not the solution.
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education = human capital
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Therefore, human capital is importnat ===> therefore to the point ===> how to do human capital
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The answer Friedman received from Schultz is understandably ambivalent, with two possible conclusions. First, returns on human capital derived from public investment (eg, taxes) ought to remain in public hands. The problem here is that this would be socialism. And besides, we’ve already learnt that the individual cannot be separated from his human capital. So that leaves only the second conclusion. If the returns on human capital derived from public investment (eg, taxes) aren’t a ‘gift’ to the individual benefactor, then he or she should bear some or all of the investment costs. In short, this is no handout.

The underlying message of human capital theory turns out to be simple, and Friedman cheerfully summed it up in a pithy catchphrase during the 1970s: there is no such thing as a free lunch.
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The idelogical conclusion is that:-

If each person is already his own means of production, then the presumed conflict at the heart of the capitalist labour process logically dissolves.

Schultz too was starting to see the light, and agreed that workers might actually be de facto capitalists: ‘labourers have become capitalists not from the diffusion of the ownership of corporation stocks, as folk law would have it, but from the acquisition of knowledge and skill that have economic value.’
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Along came Reagan and Thatcher and we have This ‘free-agent nation’
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Then the left leaning professor laments that this ‘free-agent nation’ has not lead to a workers utopia, in fact the opposite, in which he pointed out the flaws of today working environment (he did not bring up the 1% winning although he could have done that)
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As for Chinese people, there is no contradiction. The imperial exam system been there since ancient timez. Want to get ahead, pay for some education, take the exam, get your credentials, and try to move up in life.

Chinese people agree with both Schultz & Friedman. Education should be free, basic education. If you want more, you go pay for it.

That is the great irony here. In the PRC, where there is socialism with Chinese characteristics, there is no contradiction in the Human Capital Theory. It is cool!

While in the west, where they have all the answers, there is still strong dissatisfaction and this Human Capital Theory is a contentious point of debate. Not merely reflected in debates among profs, but he politicians too, which is reflective of the differences of views in society of large.
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That is what I believe in, that the ideological struggle is strong and fierce in the western world, even when they suggest it isn't, because it is.

What seems obvious to me is the right winger ideologues have the upper hand, but their victory cannot be assumed to be a sure thing. Every country is a little different.

USA going right wing. Canada left or centralist. UK right wing. German still wants Merkel centralism.

And they keep saying the contradiction of what China is trying to do will not last and could even pull it apart. BS! BS! BS!