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Theodore William Schultz (April 30, 1902 – February 26, 1998) was the 1979 winner (jointly with William Arthur Lewis) of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

He was born in Arlington, South Dakota, enrolled in South Dakota State College in 1921 to study agriculture, graduated in 1927, then entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison earning his doctorate in economics in 1930.

He later taught at Iowa State College, and moved to the University of Chicago in 1943. He later became president of the American Economic Association. He died in 1998.

Schultz was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in development economics, focusing on the economics of agriculture. He analysed the role of agriculture within the economy, and his work has had far reaching implications on industrialisation policy, both in developing and developed nations. Schultz also promulgated the idea of educational capital, an offshoot of the concept of human capital, relating specifically to the investments made in education.

Schultz researched into why post-World War II Germany and Japan recovered, at almost miraculous speeds from the wide-spread devastation. Contrast this with the United Kingdom which was still rationing food long after the war. His conclusion was that the speed of recovery was due to a healthy and highly educated population; education makes people productive and good healthcare keeps the education investment around and able to produce. One of his main contributions was later called Human Capital Theory, and inspired a lot of work in international development in the 1980s, motivating investments in vocational and technical education by Bretton Woods System International Financial Institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank.

• Redirecting Farm Policy, New York: Macmillan Company, 1943
• Agriculture in an Unstable Economy, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1945
• The Economic Organization of Agriculture, McGraw-Hill, 1953
• The Economic Value of Education, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963
• Transforming Traditional Agriculture, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964
• Economic Growth and Agriculture, New York: MacGraw-Hill, 1968
• Investment in Human Capital: The Role of Education and of Research, New York: Free Press, 1971
• Human Resources (Human Capital: Policy Issues and Research Opportunities), New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1972

• Food for the World, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1945
• Investment in Human Beings, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962
• Investment in Education: Equity-Efficiency Quandary, Chicago: University of Chigaco Press, 1972
• New Economic Approaches to Fertility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973
• Economics of the Family: Marriage, Children, and Human Capital, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974