It seems interest in human capital, which arose of late, has to do with ineptitude of capital and labor on their own to support empirically any growth path without receding because of diminishing returns (cobb Douglas type as of growth was a purely mechanical asocial process). So add an exponentially increasing variable (some concocted index out of health and education) and one is likely to get a better picture of growth in fallacious econometrics that hans ehrbar knows more about. but that to me seems like a dissection’s approach or crude empiricism supported by cook book algebra something that I was good at in the thirties. I think that any one who is good in math can write a story in mathematical symbols to suit his or her tastes. but that is a reconstruction of reality from parts done in an ad hoc fashion and without a consistent thought structure that develops from within conforming the laws of
logic to history and gradually extending itself onto more concrete and real things. When Myrdal and others talked about human capital initially, I think it was done with the aim of equalizing/launching growth for developing countries that were resource poor and needed to find other sources of income, or may be to offset the brain drain problem by making more brains. A brainless attempt in part for the division of labour is dynamic on the both sides. So before the intra country class issues emerged, human capital was an international division of labour issue or bridging-gap medium. even now, the world bank pushes an agenda of education and building human capital but gets the sequence wrong. people are poorly educated because they are poor first and then their lack of education may add to their poverty. the world bank and the IMF want to blame poverty on poor education without putting things in a historical or class context. Also empirically many countries invest in education and
remain poor…..
I think the complexity of the issue arises on methodological grounds in the sense that Marxian method distinguishes economic categories as instances of capital which is first a social relationship from which the differentiation to organic, constant and variable capital descend. Skill and human capacity leading to variations in ability to labor or variances and derivatives of concrete labor are context or class determined including as an example life expectancy. the problem is not to project the individual on the whole because in dialectics the missing medium is the ‘particular’ that mediates individual instances through struggle or a process of change into the whole or general. For a definition of marxian categories see ilyenkov.. because here individual particular and general are philosophical categories. the juxtaposition of abstract universal categories to make a case leads to a poor argument that can
be easily formally refuted. i.e. one wrong example brings down the whole edifice of a purely mental construct and that is not how in actuality things develop. there are tendencies that build or lose momentum because of agents of change.
human capital is a purely logical category but in reality it is neither human no capital it is an analytical simplification made use of in one sided half baked economic policy frameworks.
Michael,
The fact that human capital is tracked by class is not really rellevant. Does one tract physical capital by class? Does a backhoe owned by a working class person have less value than the backhoe owned by GW Bush? Only because of the social status heaped upon BW Bush by his birth/pedigree/wealth. But that is a false valuation. The backhoe in the hands of a qualified worker is worth much more than a backhoe in the hands of an incompetent GWB. So much the same with human capital.
I came from a working-class family who had the goals of educating all their children to escape from being working class, not because they were anti-working class (they were all radical socialists, union activists, political activists) but because they saw that the only way we were to escape being wage-slaves was to become educated (i.e. accumulate human capital) that would not only alow us an element of independence, but also to get "a return to our investment" in education. George Bush did not get a return to education (human capital) but to the power of priviledge -- i.e. to a monopoly of power. What you are in effect saying is that GWB got where he did because he worked harder (i.e. his return was greater than those who had equal human capital.) This, I would suggest is crap.
Paul
Michael Perelman wrote:
Paul, I don't think that "human capital" is a particularly useful concept. In the US, student are tracked according to class -- although it is not official. Even in the absence of tracking, poor students go to poor schools. So a GW Bush can go and get a Harvard MBA as evidence of human capital. Are humans capital or does the concept make capital human? I understand how I can accept a reduced income to go to med. school & get a higher income, much as a capitalist invests in capital, but there are so many factors involved. Also, much learning does not come from labor. Students usually learn more from their fellow students than from professors. Rant finished. On Mon, Mar 22, 2004 at 09:37:50PM -0800, paul phillips wrote:Michael, I have read of 'cultural capital' and 'political captital' which seems to be equivalent of that obscene capitalist construction called, I think, 'good will' which corporations can claim as wealth when they sell out. But that is not investment in any sense in that it does not involve investment of (labour) resources in creating something of productive ( and productive is the operative word) value. Human capital is something quite different. Humans invest in buying knowledge, produced by labour, which increases their productivity at a later date. In that sense, human capital is a form of 'dead labour' equivalent to physical capital. None of these others are 'real' investment in 'dead labour' and hence, are not capital in the sense we use the term. Paul Phillips-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
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