Talk:Human capital

explain this to me more

--71.215.125.65 03:25, 5 December 2006 (UTC)Could you explain this to me more?

trimmed

I've trimmed down and reworded some sentences and completely removed the gratuitous references to the human capital institute. I'm still concerned this reads too much like a Marxist vs Free Markets debate rather than constructively outlining the issues -DM 158.219.120.62 19:25, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Any "constructive" debate or agreement on what "the issues" are has to start somewhere. There are actually some pretty good explanations in there now of how different theories compete to explain the same things.

spamming

Someone is spamming this page pretty frequently. I don't know if anything could be done, but it's kind of dull reverting the changes -DM 158.219.120.62 14:17, 24 January 2007 (UTC)

If it keeps up, we can just block it for changes by unregistered users. Brallan 23:14, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

That doesn't help that much. There's always going to be a high motive to spam an article about basic economic analysis.

was slavery human capital or just human resources?

Good effort DM. I think the article would be easier to round out by comparing it to human resources. HC smacks of a replacement term for HR - an attempt to commodify people but not objectify them, an obvious impossibility. People once saw the human "commodity" as necessarily homogenous or easily interchangeable but we're much wiser now? Art and animals and crude oil and trees are all individual commodities only as homogenous and as interchangeable as the capacities of the market to recieve them as commodities and deal with their individualities. Were slaves weighed by pound?

The slavery issue is dealt with somewhat now in individual capital, a term that is more objective than "slave" or "resources" or "talent" or "labour" because it's always and only about what's attached to the individual.

Im glad to say there's no way to sanitize talking about human beings as commodities, but i'm sure that hasn't prevented scores of economists from trying. I suspect that ddddthe entire concept of human capital is an attempt to convince folks that talking about human beings as resources is OK if we can see their individuality and the subtleties created within them by our expenditures on things almost like PR - like education, churches, etc. abominable lot, the economists. Brallan 23:13, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

That may be true but "human capital" terminology is well established and it's mostly a question of knowing how to identify it's components, driving factors, and so on, in a way that recognizes individual capital value somehow, not just as "labour" or "resources" or social or "intellectual" powers. This term seems to do that well.

Well, the first I think about when I hear Human Resources or Human Capital is indeed slaves. And so you can guess how companies using this term consider the value of human life. 80.136.215.68 23:10, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Having had the opportunity to read Smith's the "The Wealth of Nations" this year, I thought it was important to make clear that Smith recognized the existence of 'human capital', even though he did not explicitly call it that. It is unfortunate that he did not analyze this 'fourth' type of fixed capital more.

In his time you talked in a very classist way about "labour". But Smith did clearly refer to entrepreneurship, initiative, as a separate thing, but not so easy to quantify. That's what modern economists are doing in intangibles analysis, and individual capital is one of their solutions to the problem of labelling what's unique about individual capital. There still has to be an article about the whole debate, though, so keeping human capital separate is the best way.

But as with other types of capital, it can only be accumulated by sacrifice (time and effort to learn, practice), and more importantly, not even the simplest 'unskilled labour' can be accomplished without some latent or tacit human capital. Knowing what a shovel is, knowing language and understanding instfcuk france ruction all require a modicum of human capital.

This is a very good observation - learning to use a shovel, practicing it, using it on behalf of someone as a social obligation, all show how human capital can interact with tools and tasks without money involved at all.

What Happens to "Human Capital" When Production No Longer Requires Labor ?

That time is really not very far off and needs to be considered. One might suggest that when production is at a level to where "human capital" is no longer needed, then it may be fair to surmize that the human needs would be satisfied by said production with no need for addition of human labor. It may be likened to approaching some sort of socialist uptopia where the machines do all the work as we pursue loftier matters of art and gamesmanship of various kinds. After all, the only reason a human picks up a shovel is to sell his labor in exchange for money with which to satisfy physical needs produced by others who, in turn, must also be compensated for their labor. If labor is no longer required, then we can let production go on while humans pursue whatever other activity they choose. Some humans have already attained such a state by creating wealth from thin air without having invested a stitch of labor.

All the more reason to differentiate individual capital as an economic view of talent, because that's whats valuable when labour is free, intellect is cheapened by AI, celebrity and social relationships arise for no discernable reason.

I correct this theory by saying that hamburgers actually originated in Hamburg, Germany. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.131.46.95 (talk) 00:33, 1 October 2008 (UTC)

There will never be a time where no human labour is required. Who will install this capital equipment? Who will maintain the capital equipment? Who will fix it when it becomes broken? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.173.12.152 (talk) 11:23, 3 April 2010 (UTC)

Signalling?

The article alludes to the hypothesis that credentials signalling innate ability may be more important than the actual education. Indeed, modern labor economists treat signalling effects (evidencing one's superior ability, given by nature, to employers who can't identify a high-ability individual from a low-ability one) as the most significant theoretical challenge to human capital theory, which is not described in the article. The seminal paper on signalling is "Job Market Signalling," by Michael Spence, which formalized games of asymmetric information and was probably the main contributor to his awarding of the Nobel Prize.

Chevalier, Harmon, Walker, and Zhu (2004) provide a lit review of the debate. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 18.188.71.152 (talk) 20:23, August 24, 2007 (UTC)

These are great observations that belong in the individual capital article, which has insufficient sources right now - moving to talk:individual capital for now

Does Education Raise Productivity, or Just Reflect it?

Yu Zhu, Arnaud Chevalier, Ian Walker, Colm Harmon all seem to be sufficient authorities to cite if not worthy of their own Wikipedia bios.

Interesting tidbit

Not sure where this would be relevant in the article, but I came across it and thought it would be interesting. (quoting the relevant passage here, since the source is probably not available online)

The notion of human capital also has, however, a negative and mechanistic connotation. Specifically the dehumanizing implication of "human capital" led Germans to confer the dubious honor on humankapital as the most unpopular word of the year 2004.

— Fladrich, Anja M. (2006). "Graduate Employment in China: The case of Jiujiang Financial and Economic College in Jiangxi". China Information. 20 (2): 203.

rʨanaɢ ^talk/_contribs 01:32, 7 September 2009 (UTC)

Is this what Carl-Henric Svanberg was talking about when he called us "the small people"?76.173.44.154 (talk) 19:16, 5 August 2010 (UTC)

individual capital merger

Comments copied from talk:individual capital to keep the debate in one page

Don't merge individual capital with human capital:

There are articles like sexual capital and extant academic terms like health capital which are clearly attributes of individual capital that have their own articles. We don't merge social capital into human capital either, as it is pretty obvious that social attributes aren't individual ones. There must be some respect in Wikipedia for a few basic ontological categories even if the literature is sometimes inconsistent in its use of terms or idiosyncratic terms (like health capital or knowledge capital) come into fashion (and just as quickly go out because they are not at all operational or measureable).

We can have a good human capital article that debates the relative importance of all of these factors, but we must retain separate articles describing each type of capital asset separately or the arguments get hopelessly confused. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 142.177.109.103 (talk) 22:23, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

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Merge the aricles, human capital is an important (economical and sociological and educational) item and needs a place in wikipedia. The item "personal capital" could have a link to human capital, because personal capital is viewed as a special view on Human Capital. So I vote for merge personal into Human Capital. JaapB (talk) 18:43, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Do you actually understand the proposal? The article's title is individual capital not "personal capital". There is no article by that name in the English Wikipedia [1] nor seemingly should there be, as no one has used that term even as a subsection name in any of the human capital articles. Of course the whole subject is important and there are many perspectives on it. Higher education for instance is all about high investment in particular individuals, without much regard to their "labour" or "social" skills. Shoving all that into the human capital article is going to get it eviscerated by financial capital experts who use (abuse?) the term in their technical "balanced growth" curves.

Also what is your source for this statement:

personal capital is viewed as a special view on Human Capital

And why do you capitalize "Human Capital" as it it were a proper noun? Are you selling something? Your argument to merge seems inane, so please explain your rationale again.

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Hello, according to Paulsen and Smart (2001) Book: The finance of higher education: Theory, Research, Policy, and Practice ISBN 0-87586-135-0 human capital can be identified as the productive capacities – knowledge, understandings, talents, and skills – possessed by an individual or society. This means personal capital is not the same as human capital. Personal refers to just one person. So, no. Merger is not a good solution. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.55.232.44 (talk) 02:39, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. Could you please provide web links to these references, you are clearly referring to this book with this review that seems to establish its credentials. The authors, Michael B. Paulsen, [2] and John C. Smart [3] (not to be confused with J._J._C._Smart who is a different person, again seem to justify citation and the use of the term.

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The only identified problem with the individual capital article, its lack of references, seems to have been resolved with all these contributions, so the merge seems premature. Let the material in the references filter its way into the article and see what happens. For now we'll leave the merge proposal up but after two years with no decisive argument to merge, it should disappear soon probably. We'll see what other editors make of the references added.

Inconsistency

The section about the origins of the term human capital refers to a quote by A.W. Lewis in 1954 and then states that the term was not used until Arthur Cecil Pigou used the term. The citation of Arthur Cecil Pigou uses a date of 1928... I don't want to delete this part since I still have to do further research, but this does not help Wikipedia's credibility. Whoever wrote this, please fix the dates. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.55.232.44 (talk) 02:25, 9 March 2011 (UTC)

This strange claim about origins seems to be gone now.

First sentence wrong

"Human capital to the stock of competences, knowledge and personality attributes embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value." - not valid english grammar. What is that meant to be? "Human capital is? --07:58, 13 April 2011 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Irrevenant (talk • contribs)

Someone with a poor grasp of the fact that "human capital" is a catch-all term without an operational definition must have written that.

Educational assignment at Symbiosis School of Economics supported by Wikipedia ambassadors

Template:IEP assignment Basic.atari (talk) 14:44, 9 August 2011 (UTC)