The first issue of this journal is out. It will be interesting to track and see what happens to the concept in light of potential upcoming shifts in U.S. imperialism. No surprise that it comes from Chicago UP, since the term is vintage Chicago school of economics.
For a quick and dirty definition, Gary Becker, one of the Chicago fathers of the term, defines it as the “knowledge, skills, health, or values” invested in and inseparable from humans that makes them productive. As “human capital” has, during Bush’s presidency, become integrated into the development regime of the World Bank, each of the attributes — knowledge, health, values– becomes targets.
Unsurprisingly, the opening issue has an overview of the concept’s history, confirming that “human capital” emerged in relation to two problematics: 1) rural development (via Theodore Shultz) and 2) fertility (via Gary Becker, who has worked in the Bush administration with Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board). Both won Nobel Prizes.
Chewing over what is different about the way “human capital” helps to reassemble production and reproduction (compared to, for example, demography) I’m trying to think through the way it shifts how “quality” matters.
On one register, human capital is an extremely attractive concept for liberals of many stripes (including feminists) because it postulates that all people, no matter their life circumstances, are rational actors who figure out what choices and practices will give them the greatest “rates of return” on their circumstances. At this register, then, human capital posits a universalized equivalence of economic rationality. Hence, unlike some other development modalities, such as modernization theory, it is not necessary to teach people how to be rational economic actors, this is a given. Going even further, however, as early as the 1960s Shultz described this subject of human capital as an individualized “entrepreneur.”
On another register, however, “rates of return ” can be increased by investing in human capital. Hence, people contain different qualities of investment in their human capital, creating a topography of uneven human worth. In terms of fertility, if there are higher rates of return when investing intensely in the human capital of children, then the families will choose to have less children, and these children will be of higher “quality” in that they are more intensely capitalized. The figure of the child with human capital is compared to the rates of the return on the bare “cost of children” whose productivity is in the form of child labor or old age insurance. “Human quality” — a term the literature explicitly uses– is economized as rates of returns.
Thus, the actionable sites for governmentality become:1) investing in human capital as individualized entrepreneurs and 2) creating conditions for greater rates of return (argued to be open markets).
