The Human Resource Economics of Vernon Briggs

Abstract

In the growing search for alternatives to the narrower versions of mainstream economic theory, the author celebrates the work of an earlier institutional economist, Vernon Briggs. Briggs's "human resource economics" draws from a variety of fields and emphasizes the importance of human capital to general prosperity. But Briggs brings a granular analysis to what, in much economic theory, can be a misleading abstraction. His economics is also unabashedly normative-an attempt to tell policymakers how to make the economy work.