Theodore William Schultz was the 1979 winner (jointly with Arthur Lewis) of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. He was born 1902 in the United States, enrolled in South Dakota State College in 1921 to study agriculture, and entered the University of Wisconsin in 1924, studying economics.

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 was awarded his Nobel prize jointly with Arthur Lewis in 1979. He died in 1998.

His contributions

Schultz was awarded the Bank of Sweden 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 to specifically to the investments made in education.