This observation helps clarify my hypothesis that job learning costs no time that might otherwise have been spent earning pay. My deeper meaning is that invested learning and maintenance learning are the same process costing the same time but with different economic effect, much as with invested and maintenance
consumption.
Evidence that hourly if not yearly pay rises until retirement, or very near, would refute Ben-Porath’s claim if human capital ended at retirement. But it continues
through retirement because imputed pay does.
Mill and a few economists before him acknowledged “productive” and “unproductive” consumption. The productive kind was what I call maintenance and invested consumption. Unproductive consumption meant any written invested for
higher pay later nor supporting survival pay now. That would give
pure consumption = maintenance consumption + unproductive consumption (5.8)
and
consumption = invested consumption + pure consumption = invested consumption + maintenance consumption
+ unproductive consumption. (5.9)
Investment and maintenance contrast in human capital as in a firm. Investment is valued only in the expectation of future maintenance. No maintenance later, no value now. To count maintenance as new investment would count part of the old investment twice. Where the accounting treatments differ is in disposition. Maintenance in the firm is recovered in pay and products. | thought before that the same was true of human capital. Thanks to the parable of the boss and her secretary,
I now I think it is exhausted in satisfying our taste for lineage survival.
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