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Human capital is the set of productive knowledge, skills, and traits that individuals possess. Productive knowledge and skills are typically learned through education and work experience. Character traits matter both for the application of knowledge and skills and for their acquisition in the first place. In the past 100 years--and with enormous social consequences--the economy has transitioned to human capital being the most important resource for individual and social outcomes. Societies responded by emphasizing schooling as the means to develop this resource. In recent decades, however, researchers have discovered that human capital acquisition depends on certain character skills best developed early in life before schooling starts, typically within families. Current research and policy are investigating which combination of early life schooling and improvement in family circumstances can best help people acquire the character skills, and then human capital, needed to flourish. These changes have important implications for the social teachings of the Catholic Church, including moral insights into the distribution of resources, emphasis on the active subject in human work, and the role of civil society in promoting ideas and institutions conducive to an ideal human ecology., Introduction For much of human history, labor was relatively homogenous. Land and natural resources, followed later by physical and financial capital, were the dominant means of production. Their level and [...]

The twentieth century saw dramatic increases in nonmarital births, concentrated heavily among poor and working-class women. In this paper, we investigate whether the oral contraceptive pill played a causal role in the rise of nonmarital births. Exploiting exogenous variation in laws governing access to the pill, we find that changes in marital access to the pill increased the nonmarital birthrate by between 15% and 18%, accounting for about one-third of the overall increase in nonmarital births. These effects are concentrated almost entirely among women whose fathers did not graduate high school and among minority women. We also document that the pill increased spacing between first and second births, and lowered the probability that a woman obtained a high-school diploma, consistent with increases in nonmarital births. We find no evidence that postsecondary education levels were influenced by pill access, and no evidence that nonmarital births move with male employment patterns. Our findings add to a growing literature which documents the power of the pill to shape women's lives in broadly heterogenous ways, with minority and less-well-educated women bearing the brunt of the losses, a phenomenon we call the paradox of the pill. (JEL J12, J13, 124), I. INTRODUCTION The fraction of births to unmarried women increased rapidly after 1960, from roughly 5% to 40% of all births (Martin et al. 2013; Ventura and Bachrach 2000), and [...]

The article offers information on economic rights, reciprocity, and the modern economic tradition. Topics discussed include anthropology and teleology of the liberal tradition; liberal tradition of modern economics with an alternative tradition represented by Catholic social teaching; and Catholic teaching on economic rights.