A public seminar from the Department of Education, given by Professor Hugh Lauder, University of Bath. Human capital theory has dominated the understanding of the relationship of education to work. It has retained plausibility until now due to the social context in which it was articulated. But that context has now changed, radically. It is now exposed as a fundamentally flawed account of the education-economy relationship, theoretically and empirically. This seminar will explain why that is the case and how we move forward with a new account.