How universities helped transform the medieval world

Policy choices made by the ‘states’ of the time – both in the education sector per se, and in the labour market – were thus crucial to the success of the first universities, and the investments made in the new form of human capital that they produced. This pattern was repeated in the public support for many of America’s research universities in the 19th and 20th centuries, and it bears remembering in the 21st century

Read it at Vox.eu
How universities helped transform the medieval world
by Davide Cantoni, Chair of Economic History at the University of Munich and  Noam Yuchtman, Assistant Professor, Haas School of Business, UC-Berkeley
(h/t Mark Thoma)

Lessons learned, lessons forgotten.