Generation Bubble

Manufacturing Ascent: Elite Institutions and Social Mobility

The very idea of human capital suggests that the human in question has in her possession something that will entitle her to profits down the road. But I’m afraid that “human capital,” for all of its jazzy, ultra-contemporary ring, is just a version of Marxian labor power gussied up for a techno-oligopolic age. Being a locus of human capital doesn’t necessarily make one a capitalist. Her capital, like the worker’s labor power of Karl Marx’s time, depends on being sold into a market in which the advantage accrues to those with good old-fashioned capital.