Becker himself highlighted research findings that one quarter of the rise in per-person incomes from 1929 to 1982 in America was because of increases in schooling.
贝克尔本人强调了美国的人均收入在1929年到1982间的提高中的四分之一是因为教育的发展的研究发现。
Much of the rest, he insisted, was a result of harder-to-measure gains in human capital such as on-the-job training and better health.
他坚称，余下的大都是人力资本中那些更加难以衡量的收获的结果，如在职培训和更好的健康。
He was also fond of pointing to the success of Asian economies such as South Korea and Taiwan, endowed with few natural resources other than their populations, as proof of the value of investing in human capital—and in particular of building up education systems.
他还喜欢把南韩和中国台湾这些除了人口之外没有被赋予多少自然资源的亚洲经济体的成功，看成人力资本投资——尤其是构建教育体系投资——的价值的证明。
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Becker's original analysis focused on the private benefits to students, but economists who followed in his footsteps expanded their field of study to include the broader social gains from having well-educated populations.
贝克尔的原创分析把重点放在了学生的私人收获上面，但是，追随他的脚步的经济学家把他们的研究领域扩到到了拥有受过良好教育的人口的更为广泛的社会收获方面。
The importance of human capital is now taken for granted.
如今，人力资本的重要性已经不言而喻。
What is more controversial is the question of how to cultivate it.
更具争议性的是如何培育人力资本的问题。
For those inclined to support a bigger state, one interpretation of Becker's analysis is that the government ought to pour money into education and make it widely available at a low cost.
对于倾向于支持大政府的人来说，对贝克尔分析的一种解释是，政府应当把钱投入教育，使之可以广泛地以低成本获得。
For a conservative, the conclusion might be that the private gains from education are so big that students should bear the costs of tuition.
对于保守人士而言，结论可能是，教育的私人收获之大，使得学生应该承担学费成本。
Although Becker's academic writings rarely strayed into policy prescriptions, his popular writings—a monthly Businessweek column that began in the 1980s and blog posts in later years—offer a measure of his views.
尽管贝克尔的学术著作几乎从不涉及政策处方，但是，他的通俗文章——始于上世纪80年代的《商业周刊》月度专栏以及后来日子里的博客文章——却提供了对他的观点的一种衡量标准。
For starters, he talked of “bad inequality” but also “good inequality”, an unfashionable idea today.
首先，他谈到过“坏的不平等”，也曾论及“好的不平等”，这一当今不流行的观点。
Higher earnings for scientists, doctors and computer programmers help motivate students to tackle these difficult subjects, in the process pushing knowledge forward; from this perspective, inequality contributes to human capital.
科学家、医生和计算机程序员的越来越高的收入有助于激发学生涉足这些困难的课题，在这一过程中推动知识进步；从这个角度来看，不平等有助于人力资本。
But when inequality gets too extreme, the schooling and even the health of children from poor families suffer, with their parents unable adequately to provide for them.
但是，当不平等变得过于极端，学校教育乃至贫困家庭的孩子都会因为父母不能足够地提供给他们而深受其害。
Inequality of this sort depresses human capital, leaving society worse off.
这种不平等让人力资本贬值，使社会每况愈下。
As for the debate about whether government-funded universities should raise tuition fees, Becker thought that only fair, given that their graduates could expect higher lifetime earnings.
至于由政府资助的大学是否应当提高学费的争论，贝克尔认为，考虑到它们的毕业生可以期望更高的终身收入，这是唯一公平的。
Rather than subsidising students who go on to become bankers or lawyers, he argued that it would be more productive for the government to fund research and development.
他指出，与其资助今后将成为银行家或者律师的学生，政府把资金用于研发会更加高效。
Yet, concerned by mounting inequality in America, he thought that more should be done to invest in early childhood education and improve the state of schools.
然而，出于对美国不断上升的不平等的担忧，他认为，应当加大在儿童早教方面的投资并提高学校状况。
Becker applied his own prodigious reserves of human capital well beyond education.
贝克尔对他自己庞大的人力资本储备的应用远远超出了教育。
He used his “economic approach” to look at everything from the motives of criminals and drug addicts to the evolution of family structures and discrimination against minorities.
他把他的“经济方法”运用到了考察了从罪犯的动机到吸毒上瘾再到家庭结构的进化以及对少数民族的歧视等所有一切上面。
In 1992 he was awarded the Nobel prize for extending economic analysis to new spheres of human behaviour.
1992年，他因为将经济学分析扩展到人类行为的新领域而荣获诺贝尔奖。
He remains one of the most cited economists of the past half-century.
他仍然是过去50年中被引用最多的经济学家之一。
Mr Becker's way of doing economics, initially a radical challenge to convention, came under attack as it went mainstream.
贝克尔研究经济学的方式，最初是对传统的一种激进挑战，随着它进入主流，开始遭到攻击。
The rise of behavioural economics, with its emphasis on limits to rationality, undercut his depiction of people as rational agents seeking to maximise welfare.
以强调理性极限为特点的行为经济学的兴起，动摇了他将人作为追求福祉最大化的理性代理人的论述。
Improvements in data collection and analysis also gave rise to more detailed empirical research, instead of the wide-ranging concepts that he favoured.
数据收集和分析的提高也让更为详尽的实证研究、而不是他中意的各种大范围的概念得以兴起。
Yet precisely because Mr Becker's analysis touched on so much, it still has a lot to offer.
然而，正是因为贝克尔的分析触及了这么多东西，它仍然有很多可以提供。
Consider the debate on how governments ought to respond to disruptive technological change.
以政府应当如何应对毁灭性技术变革为例。
From the standpoint of human capital, one answer is obvious.
从人力资本的角度来看，一种答案是显而易见的。
Technological advances mean that the knowledge that people acquire in school is becoming obsolete more quickly than before.
技术进步意味着人们在学校中获取的知识正在比以往更快地变得过时。
At the same time, longer life expectancies mean that the returns on mid-career training are higher than in the past.
与此同时，不断延长的预期寿命意味着职业生涯中期培训的回报比过去高了。
It is therefore both necessary and possible to replenish human capital by designing better systems for lifelong learning.
因而，通过设计更好的终身学习体系来充实人力资本既是必需的，也是可能的。
This is just one element of the response to technological disruption but it is a vital one.
这仅仅是对技术毁灭之应对中的一个要素，却是非常关键的一个要素。
Becker never intended that his theory of human capital explain everything in economics, only that it explain a little about a lot.
贝克尔从未有过让他的人力资本理论解释经济学中的一切的想法，他只是认为这一理论解释了许多中的一部分。
On this count his work remains indispensable.
从这方面来说，他的研究仍然是不可或缺的。
来源：经济学人
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