“Stock”.
IT’S A COOK-BOOK!
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It is. You can draw a direct line from the Protestant Work Ethic to de-humanising technocratic terminology in a non-academic context like this. This is not Kevin Hassett miscommunicating and being tone-deaf, but Kevin Hassett reacting to an unusually dire challenge to capitalism by bluntly expressing conservatism’s rotten 16th century view of who is “deserving” and who is not.
Get back to work, peons! Your cubicle farm (now with new plexiglass shields) awaits your return!
Oh, dearie me, pearls will be clutched here today.
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Even the way the article uses that term is not reassuring or standard within economics when talking about the labor force. The official didn’t just say ‘human capital’. He said “human capital stock”, which has a specific and dehumanizing meaning according to the linked article.
human capital stock (i.e., the value of the labor force from the viewpoint of a potential slave owner)
Weird that this very specific term just sort of popped out when he was off-guard …
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You haven’t been paying much attention to current events, obviously enough. No, it’s not even slightly an overreaction. Governments fall for much less, throughout history.
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It’s not “nearly” a science; agriculture and animal husbandry very much are sciences.
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Looks like when they were fighting the wearing of masks, they forgot to hold on to the mask of human decency. Good. They need to show us what they are and truly value, and we – the people – need to take the revelation to heart.
We are simply the cogs they need to keep their money machines running. We are easily replaceable in their eyes. Plug-n-Play people. This is more clear every day “in these unsettling times” (as all the commercials are reminding us) when their money machines are sputtering.
Then they can rest smugly in their graves, knowing 6-feet-deep-down they won.
Seriously though, they’ve been taking the low road for ages, and are destroying us. The fear of “becoming them” at this point should not make us hesitate to return the favor.
To be clear, I’m not talking about killing them – as I know I alluded to earlier – I was just riffing on what @RandomDude was saying.
I’m talking about impoverishing them. Bringing them down to our level and having them experience the extreme lack of a social-safety-net that they have created for the majority of us.
I recognize that a certain minority are able to grab and hold riches and power, primarily through advantages not afforded to the majority of people. That’s not to say that others, given the opportunity, would react differently.
Hoarding wealth is what should be outlawed, not just changing who is hoarding the wealth.
Which we don’t have, and possibly never had. A Capitalist focused government is never working for the good of the people, it works for the good of capital and capitalists. If you aren’t the advantaged in this system, you get what they give you and lately, they don’t want to give you shit.
But you can use him to cook the fish and sell that cooked fish to another man for more money. Maybe three times the price, if you plate it well and give it a fancy name.
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Science is about diligence and discipline. Art is about technique and innovation. Business is mostly hustle.
I think it’s time we stop pretending people who got financially lucky are somehow better than the rest of us.
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Fair point, especially when talking about agriculture and animal husbandry in general. What I had in mind is that specifically with milk production cutting-edge tech and know-how frequently isn’t published in peer reviewed journals first, mostly because the large part of research isn’t done by academia. In my former scientific discipline - experimental mechanics - most of cutting-edge stuff originated from academia, so it just feels different to me.
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“Build a man a fire, and he’ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.” - Terry Pratchett
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As the prosecutor said in THX 1138: “Economics must not dictate situations which are obviously religious.” And tossing poors into the grinder has passed the point of being merely about profit maximization some time ago.
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I wonder whether even this is true. Technology has done away with many hard, and hazardous jobs. We could have the basic wage for everyone. They want to keep the rabble in fear of their jobs and their health, and to fight each other for the jobs that remain.
This is also harmful. Socialism is often painted as the politics of envy: “We can’t have it, so you aren’t going to have it either”. That is not how it works. Sometimes we need unusual people to create new industries. What you don’t need is their chinless bourgeoisie spawn sitting on the board for all eternity. As long as the resource flows steadily back into the common pool, there should be no need for extreme action.
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This article brought Bruce Bueno De Mesquita and Alastair Smith’s “The Dictator’s Handbook” strongly to mind. It’s an excellent, albeit disturbing and somewhat depressing read ^^’.
There’s a great CGP Grey summary as well, “The Rules for Rulers”:
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Open a feed line from the Human Capital Stock tank to the processing line.
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Human capital stock appears to be a dehumanizing bit of economics jargon.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0,47&q="human+capital+stock"
though people have been attuned to this alienating aspect from the beginning.
It may seem odd now, but I hesitated a while before deciding to call my book Human Capital […]. In the early days many people were criticizing this term and the underlying analysis because they believed that it treated people like slaves or machines. My, how things have changed!
–Gary S. Becker, 1989 as quoted in Morgan Adamson, 2009, “The human capital strategy”, ephemera 9(4): 271-284
(Adamson’s paper criticizes Becker from a Marxian perspective, and so may be worth reading)
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Tuna is a problem
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And that science is feeding the world. Without that 5x production increase, billions would starve. This is why “organic” farming is an eco-luxury fallacy for white people, and basically condoning population control. It’s not nearly productive enough to feed the world, and doesn’t scale at all. It produces 20% less on the same land as scientific methods, and depends largely on byproducts of industrial farming methods, such as manure from feedlots (which would not exist if they got their way). This is not endorsing all of current industrial food practice, but we can’t just throw it away either.
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Piketty uses the economics term “human capital” and directly, unambiguously compares it to slavery. He doesn’t pull punches that, in the context of inequality, labor is being exploited when there is overt extraction of their work product stolen by non-labor capital.
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This is definitely true concerning edible crops of all kinds, but a cultural shift towards consuming less animal products could severely curtail the most unethical and environmentally damaging practices.
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“Good people make good food”
-Soylent Corporation motto
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