(Seven-minute read)

The term ” Human capital” suggests that we create ourselves as social beings, and then society recognizes the outcome of our self-making by assigning them values. This value is then exchanged for commodities and services of equal value.

WE SPEND OUR LIVES TRYING TO MAKE THIS VALUE HIGHER.

No discussion of human capital can omit the influence of families on the knowledge, skills, health, values, and habits. But when we become a risk, a drain on society, a problem of a life gone on too long we reflect the political and economic goals that the notion of human capital was designed to fulfil – profit.

When we assign value to human life it means different worth including negative value – to the lives of different people. Life subsequently came to be valued according to its ability to foster the national economy – its potential contribution to GDP with nil contribution deemed a surplus to manage.

This has become the bedrock of modern capitalism – persons and profit with the smartphone transferring its owner into an asset of significant value.

Profit-seeking Algorithms that are now embedded in our societies making it seem natural to be monitored and to allow access to every moment of our days.

Assigning life a market value is no way to guarantee that this value will be high.

Everyone is able to help themselves but information technologies are fastening individuals to prefabricated categories ( Age, gender, religion, ) solidifying us as persons of a certain kind.

Even if we consider ourselves to be so much more than our data or human capital, we cultivate, display, and leverage, our socially recognized arsenal of valued traits—no matter how worrying the manner in which they were consolidated—whenever circumstances call for it.

Human capital, then, is something other than the sum total of our ambition.

Like other kinds of capital, its value is set by market dynamics that support a larger process of accumulation.

We are unable to determine how much we are worth to our society.

There is no stopping this form of unattachment to reality, to politics, to nature, to others and it is destined to become worse. We have world leaders Twittering, governments pandering to populism, androids apps grabbing your data even if you block them.

Indeed it would be fair to say that Capitalism is disappearing underground.

The idea of human lives as surplus—superfluous to society rather than being its building blocks—offends our robust sense of self.

However, in designating selfhood unique yet classifiable, a personal project of self-creation yet a collective subject of political policy, we end up with human capital.

We feel oppressed by constantly having to demonstrate our worth in a matrix of investments and returns.

Is there any solution to this detachment?

Not with Social media that is putting a protective net around people with this net actually becoming a limiting cage.

A vote every five or ten years will not do it.

Countries must enable their citizens to become involved directly in the economy by offering non-trading but inheritable Participation Bonds with guaranteed returns in order to make the economy serve the people rather than the other way around.

In a world of universal and instantaneous communication with robotic technology now treating our abilities to earn a living the coffers of the state are diminishing.

Some will say that Participation Bonds is a form of Socialism.

It might well be but it is not the state owning the assets of a country but its people have a vested interest.

The current relationship between the balance sheet value of human capital and the operating costs of the human capital is not realistic. Successful leaders want to know how their people are deployed and new technological advances clearly are of little value to countries that don’t put their people first.

Therefore, economists regard expenditures on education, training, medical care, and so on as investments in human capital. They are called human capital because people cannot be separated from their knowledge, skills, health, or values in the way they can be separated from their financial and physical assets but tangible forms of capital are not the only type of capital.

No matter what colour, creed or status you are if you are not attached you cannot reap the rewards.

Other words if you are on a sailing boat crossing the Atlantic there is no point in being pushed over or jumping overboard if you want to arrive.

The old adage of “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves no longer applies.

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks and abuse chucked in the bin.