“Its the people that make Soylent Green taste so good”
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In common parlance, the situation of indebted students is often likened to in- dentured servitude.27 While this claim might appear to be hyperbolic, it indexes the growing sense that financial institutions are engaged in forms of exploitation that exceed the bounds of what is permissible within the bourgeois framework of free labor. Though student debt is not necessarily a form of indentured servitude, it has produced a fertile ground for new and more menacing financial technolo- gies to emerge. The current crisis of funding in higher education, induced by eco- nomic restructuring, has led to a call for further market-based solutions to solve this manufactured problem. Perhaps the most disturbing trend is the push from within the financial sector towards financing higher education through “Human Capital Contracts.” First introduced by Milton Friedman in 1945, the Human Capital Contract creates “a financial instrument that would allow investors to ‘buy’ part of a student’s future income.”28 The concept of human capital, developed by neo-classical economists in the mid-twentieth century, is a radical model of valuing human life that renders the knowledge, skills, and education of an individual as a form of fixed capital. Milton Friedman writes of education, “it is a form of investment in human capital precisely analogous to investment in machinery, buildings, or other forms of non-human capital. Its function is to raise the economic productivity of the human being.”29 A Human Capital Contract, then, treats funding a student’s education as an investment in fixed capital or increasing “equity,” and the returns come from the investor receiving a pre-determined percentage of the student’s income for a large portion of her working life.
Morgan Adamson, (2009) “The Financialization of student life: five propositions on student debt”
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Definitely! That almost certainly needs to be part of the solution.
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What can qualify as “hard and hazardous jobs” can be somewhat fluid. Right now I would call food service 'hard and hazardous," and technology hasn’t done away with that. Not that they aren’t trying.
I’m well aware that there’s nothing the “job creators” would like to do more than replace their workers with tech they don’t have to pay or give benefits. Assuming outsourcing isn’t a viable options in the interim. You can already see the way the low-tech solutions of switching to “contract workers” or keeping hours below full-time have been embraced by all kinds of businesses as a way to circumvent having to provide benefits to the people they rely on.
When they finally do have the needed tech, nothing of substance will be done to help the people who have been displaced in a country where being jobless is seen as a personal failure.
I’m not referring to socialism. I’m referring to the collapse of capitalism through the actions and inactions of the wealthy in charge during the current pandemic. Their inability to visualize a greater good beyond “what’s good for me and mine right now?”
The short-sightedness of reopening too soon to save the economy at the expense of our most endangered citizens.
The way they seem to think that each of the deaths they are so cavalier about must happen in a vacuum and have no impact on the people connected to the deceased, and will therefor have no deeper impact on the economy.
We aren’t even going to have to drag them down at this rate. They are going to fall naturally. But even if the dollar collapses, their current wealth and connection will provide them with a cushier landing than most of us.
Yes, but if we limit ourselves to unusual people who also have wealth, then we could be missing out on great things that could be created by people who don’t have the money and connections of the few.
How many geniuses have been wasted because the circumstances of their births put them in positions where they couldn’t succeed in this country; either due to discrimination or poverty?
Let’s also not forget some of these new industries created by unusual and wealthy people are intended to keep the masses under control and the “right people” in power.
I agree with this.
And is it steadily flowing back into the common pool? If not, does that mean there is now a need for extreme action?
This ship will not right itself. The people in charge will never make a move toward anything that might hurt their personal fortunes in any way. Congress will not vote for stricter regulations of themselves; not a cut in pay, nor a limitation to terms or their lifelong salaries. Why would they? They are too connected to wealth, and too beholden to capitalism, to ever make a change for the better; Ds or Rs. They are primarily focused on making things easier for the people who got them into power at the expense of anyone else; their corporate donors.
I wish they could be made to wear NASCAR style jackets with the logos of every special interest group they serve. But they wouldn’t vote to approve that either.
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And whenever possible, work is being offloaded onto the paying customer as well. See, for instance, the self check-out terminals at grocery stores or the order kiosks that have started to proliferate at fast food places. One person is now being paid to do the work that had been done by several, and customers are being imposed upon in terms of time and labor without any compensation ('cause lord knows the prices haven’t dropped any).
Precisely.
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I feel like that’s headway into tech replacing the workers. They can’t automate it all, some of it will be borne by the customer. It’s a transitional period until they find a way to get rid of the one live worker they are still paying. If they can’t get rid of that person, then split the shifts up between a couple people so they make as little as possible and don’t get benefits. Capitalism won.
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doesn’t the concept of human capital imply that the employee has some inalienable worth? To some extent, a skilled cashier can be replaced by a machine, or a low skilled worker operating a more sophisticated machine.
The expression “Our human capital stock is ready to go back to work” seems to imply that telecommuting has not worked.
Telecommuting works fine, IF done properly and you don’t need a physical product at the other end. You’re not going to “telecommute” the construction of a house, for example.
People who think telecommuting is the answer to all ills must not like literally everything they own =p .
I realize that. At the same time, I wonder if the notion of human capital (in the legitimate jargon of neoliberal economics) has caused our society to overvalue “knowledge workers.”
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There’s a lot to unpack here…
I guess no one has told India about that.
Or Senegal:
Or Cuba:
Or China:
And before anyone here points out that organic farmers are struggling, I talk to farmers in Central Texas weekly, and my impression is that all farmers are struggling, everywhere, unless we’re talking about agribusiness giants like ConAgra, Archer Daniels Midland etc. with their congress-critters bought and paid for.
Government subsidies handed to the biggest agribusinesses enable undercutting regular, smaller scale farmers who tend to take better care of their land. Oh man, how much more “efficient” could we all be if we had extra free money to keep us afloat and make our bookkeeping balance!
I am going to take a wild guess the science you are referring to here is the spray-and-pray, Monsanto-, DowDupont-, Bayer-based, conventional ag farming industry…
Speaking of agribusiness, here’s a succinct, fact-based, evidence-based rebuttal, in Scientific American:
The widespread ruination of human health, clean water, clean air, viable soil microbes and biota that support more plants’ efficient use of nutrients and water, while maintaining friability, percolation and moisture retention, are but some of the externalized costs conventional ag is keen to hide.
Here are a few externalities that are no longer hidden:
Conventional ag is all about yield, it treats people and land like a factory and machine to pump out product. Vast quantities of human capital stock is required to get food to U.S. tables. Here’s some human capital stock that never gets time off:
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/farmworkers-are-deemed-essential-are-not-protected-covid-19
Conventioal ag externalizes the toll on the entire ecosystem (of which humans are one part): the future viability of pollinators…
Three-fourths of the world’s flowering plants and about 35 percent of the world’s food crops depend on animal pollinators to reproduce. More than 3,500 species of native bees help increase crop yields. Some scientists estimate that one out of every three bites of food we eat exists because of animal pollinators like bees, butterflies and moths, birds and bats, and beetles and other insects.
… soil, aquifers, etc.
The term pesticide covers a wide range of compounds including insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, rodenticides, molluscicides, nematicides, plant growth regulators and others. Among these, organochlorine (OC) insecticides, used successfully in controlling a number of diseases, such as malaria and typhus, were banned or restricted after the 1960s in most of the technologically advanced countries. The introduction of other synthetic insecticides – organophosphate (OP) insecticides in the 1960s, carbamates in 1970s and pyrethroids in 1980s and the introduction of herbicides and fungicides in the 1970s–1980s contributed greatly to pest control and agricultural output. Ideally a pesticide must be lethal to the targeted pests, but not to non-target species, including man. Unfortunately, this is not the case, so the controversy of use and abuse of pesticides has surfaced. The rampant use of these chemicals, under the adage, “if little is good, a lot more will be better” has played havoc with human and other life forms.
There are limits to the continual pouring chemicals on the land to make up for the lasting damage done to a living ecosystem that we rely on not to starve to death. We are seeing those limits now.
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What a bizarre straw man to jump to based on what I wrote. As for the rest of your gish gallop, this is not the right place to pick it apart, so carry on.
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I don’t have any dairy experience, but for other agricultural fields it’s very much the case that land grant colleges are doing extensive research and disseminating that information to farmers through the extension offices.
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Did Bovine University get renamed Trump University or vice versa?
I misread that as: GOPs and coporates, “We eat people.”
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“inalienable”? Hardly. The fact employees are successfully replaced by machines/tech, or paid as little as possible to keep them working, shows their worth isn’t inalienable.
“intrinsic” worth, maybe? But even with that, who is setting the “worth” of a person? Who decides when a person is worthless?
Capitalists and politicians.
Ask them if they really feel anyone is worth more than they are. The fact they are willing and eager to allow so many “worthless” people suffer financial hardships and/or die is a clue to the answer I would expect if they were being honest.
I don’t see any of them eager to hop aboard the death train, but many/most of them are more than willing to shove us on.
Does it? I’m not sure where you are getting that from the video clip. That wasn’t my takeaway at all.
I agree with @Bozobub that telecommuting works for business that it works for; businesses that don’t only have a physical product or service to provide. My company has been doing it since March and it has worked for us so far, apart from losing clients who rely on providing physical goods. As they go, we will go.
If I had to guess “our human capitol stock” is more desperate to go back to work, than ready. Bills are piling up because capitalism can’t stop grinding and our rulers have no real interest in help the ones being grounded. Or something substantial would have been done for the people in the first bill, and not the corporations.
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The ultimate end-goal here is to replace all workers with automated systems, in every industry.
Capitalists tend to claim that the displaced workers will just get jobs somewhere else, and that the “market” depends on having paid workers in order to buy the products of the capitalists in order for make money.
But in the end, they wont. Jobs will get scarcer, and scarcer, and the capitalists will shift to only making things for other rich capitalists since there aren’t enough normal folks who can afford to buy anything. Once automation is complete, very few people will be needed to keep the system going. At that point, its the control over the resources that matter.
Have an automated mine to get ore, send it with automated machinery to an automated steel mill, which forwards it to an automated production line to make a new luxury car. And no room or need for normal people in that mix. All done by automation. The “Rich” won’t need us anymore, either as employees or consumers. They can have the automated systems they own and control build what they need, from the raw resources that they will have exclusive control over.
Unless we eat the rich first.
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To paraphrase something John Oliver once said about Stephen Harper (then the Canadian PM): that’s not a thing a human says, that’s a thing a robot that’s pretending to be a human says.
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Imagine two workers, an unskilled one, working at a very expensive machine, and skilled one who has learned for ten years on the job.
The unskilled one can be dismissed fairly easily. The skilled one can be fired, but the employer has to train a new worker.
In both cases, the investor has made a capital investment, but in the second case part or all of that investment is inalienable from the human. An argument for public schools?
Apparently, the concept has been around for a while.
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True, the skills can’t be taken when they fire you, or you leave; although if they could, they would, which is why some companies resort to NDAs to keep you from using those skills for their competitors for a number of years, and to lock you into working for them in the first place. They’ve invested in you after all.
Your skills are only useful if you are still able to use them. And they only have worth if someone else is willing to pay you for them. Once upon a time I could calibrate a TTU-205 Pressure/Temperature Test Set. After I left the AF, nobody wanted to pay me to do that.
I’m not saying people don’t have worth. I’m saying the worth we have isn’t what’s ascribed to us by our capitalist overlords and we need to understand that and make that known.
And I’m saying that applying the term “human capital” to people is dark, no matter how long it has been around. It’s dehumanizing, and obviously a plank in the house neoliberalism built.
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