Summary A Method of Recording Educational Investment in the 19th and 20th Century — Germany, France, Great Britain and Spain compared After a long period of hibernation, long wave theory was brought out and dusted off again by economic historians in the 1970s for new, vigorous applications in macroeconomic analysis. During the same period, the major market economies experienced greater variability in real income growth rates, thus marking the end of a period of an almost uninterrupted growth enjoyed by most industrialized economies since World War II. This renewed interest in long wave theory, which coincided with the crisis in Keynesian economics, became increasingly identified with a profound rethinking of macroeconomic theory. This paper is a contribution to the process, and postulates a link between expenditure on human development (education, wages, health care, etc.) and that devoted to material growth.