Nothing New Under the Sun?

Interestingly, my background research on "cognitive capital" turns up some work by McFadden and others around 2000. The really cute thing is that they actually use the term "cognitive capital" and in roughly the same way I use it.

As far as I can tell the work seems to be mainly empirical in nature, primarily focusing on experiments. I have not yet seen a formal theory. If anyone has seen one let me know. I think there is some really cool work to be done here.

If you can model comprehesion as a produciton function of cognitive labor and cognitive capital then the Inada conditions should hold. If you combine that with non-linear depreciation my guess is that the importance of early childhood eduction/mental stimulation will fall right out.