Got learnin’? Congratulations, you’re human capital.

What brains they must have at Christminster and the great schools, he presently thought, to learn words one by one up to tens of thousands! There were no brains in his head equal to this business; and as the little sun-rays continued to stream in through his hat at him, he wished he had never seen a book, that he might never see another, that he had never been born. — Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure

A favorite pastime of mine involves cuing up on CNN.com the video feed of some major political event. As the video starts rolling, I pull up Calculated Risk’s comment page on my browser, refreshing the screen in order to keep up with the torrent of remarks. The remarks thereon counterpoise wonderfully the hackneyed phrases and strained evasions which pass for political discourse these days.

The Calculated Risk gang, its core members and supernumeraries, form the modern, cyberspatial equivalent of Greek chorus: voices unremitting in their directness and honesty,  exposing foibles, mocking prevarications or temporizing, and generally calling bullshit on the elaborate make-believe by which most of the infamies masquerading as policy wriggle their way into law.

President Obama’s January 27, 2010 state of the union address, the first of his administration, offered yet another opportunity to indulge my habit. So, drink in hand, I tuned into CNN.com for the goose and CR for the sauce. The CR chorus were in rare form. I especially enjoy moments when the event under discussion gets bogged down, the blather having become either tedious or too silly to merit comment. At such moments, side conversations develop, digressions breed tangents, and things sometimes get a little weird. (Inevitably, someone lets fly with some remark that verges on Art Bell subject matter.) It’s as if the CR comment page exists in some kind of Newtonian relationship with the political event on view: as the latter gets more boring, the former gets more interesting.

The hoarding of financial and cultural capital by a handful of pedigreed institutions leads to a state of inefficiency rivaling that of the most suffocating totalitarian bureaucracy.

During Obama’s speech, one CR comment contributor going by the screen name “ResistanceIsFeudal” fell into an exchange with another, “yagij,” concerning the character of toxic assets that got shifted onto the U.S. Treasury’s ledger during that Ragnarok of Autumn 2008, which gave the nation TARP, TALF and PPIP, and unleashed hordes of blue-suited and briefcased berserkers raging for blood and treasure. Details are hazy as to the particulars of this exchange, but it appears to hinge on disagreement between yagij and ResistanceIsFeudal about what constitutes capital. It seems yagij cleaves to a conventional view on that magical stuff, whereas ResistanceIsFeudal takes a broader, less historically specific view. “I meant capital in its archaic sense,” ResistanceIsFeudal writes in response to yagij’s objection, “the collection of ideas, effective techniques, experimental progress and ability to take risks that make growth and improvement and learning through experience possible.” ResistanceIsFeudal then followed this qualification with this rather pungent bit of commentary:

Our real death was in concentrating that capital into Fortune 500′s, Ivy Leagues, and multibillion-dollar defense conglomerates instead of spreading it far and wide. Diminishing marginal utility, overspecialization, institutional overreach and ignoring low-hanging fruit, failing to educate and guide people of lesser capabilities — in favor of self-congratulatory circle-jerks and competition so intense you have to cheat to win.

ResistanceIsFeudal’s remarks fairly encapsulate the immense squandering that I and just about everyone whose opinion I respect regard as marking our contemporary moment. Such squandering, its no exaggeration to claim, is the spirit of the age. Those who champion capitalism present as its chief virtue that, while admittedly imperfect, capitalism presents the best means for allocating scarce resources to those who can best dispose of them. This occurs via the pricing mechanism, the story goes. Critical therefore to this mechanism’s efficacy are a market economy and the competition this kind of economy induces. But, as ResistanceIsFeudal points out, capital has a funny way of accumulating in a few hands, and, once this happens, the playing field tilts ever more to those who already enjoy an advantage, who then subsequently dictate the terms and conditions under which all future comers will seek to maximize their own utility. The net effect, the hoarding of financial and cultural capital by a handful of pedigreed institutions, leads to a state of inefficiency rivaling that of the most suffocating totalitarian bureaucracy.

Heaven's gate: elite institutions stoke the fire of competition.

I guess I found ResistanceIsFeudal’s remarks so arresting because they perfectly describe my own situation. As someone who spent nearly his entire life west of the Mississippi and who is now trying to make it on the East Coast, I feel quite poignantly the effects of diminished marginal utility, overspecialization, institutional overreach and the forsaking of low-hanging fruit (I assume with this last observation ResistanceIsFeudal alluding to some problem of Pareto optimality, but I’m not sure). My State-U credentials, acquired in the hinterlands, seem of little currency among those bright bulbs forced in the hothouses of elite prep schools and colleges.

Fellow GenBubchik Rob Horning posted on his Pop Matters blog Marginal Utility an entry entitled “Meritocratic Alibis,” the opening paragraph of which captures my sentiments exactly. “Grooming for the habitus of command begins early, and most of the kids who go to the elite schools probably have no idea that they have been conditioned to presume their own significance, to assume authority as if by some instinct of entitlement, to never doubt the value of the contributions they have to make,” Horning writes.

The rest of us, we derive that attitude vicariously from various representations of celebrity and heroism, which serves to reinforce the idea that such presumption has no place in our everyday lives. What the privileged experience as entitlement, we experience as ambition, a fire that must be continually stoked and for which fuel can be scarce.

If meritocracy has any validity, if it maintains any hold on the middle-class Imaginary, it’s as stepping stone to this position of preeminence, where any kind of Horatio-Alger-type striver’s children, and their children’s children, will someday get to experience that illusion wherein noblesse oblige is altogether natural, indeed necessary. Middle-class meritocrats like to think that at the top of the ladders they so strenuously climb there awaits a turnstile, and are disappointed to find instead a tall iron gate. This class-consciousness tango has the effect of persuading middle-class aspirants to ignore “low-hanging fruit” in favor of the the hope of replicating the elite’s attainments, while at the same time reinforcing the elite’s prerogative by channeling demand into desire for the trappings of their status. Competition thus becomes fiercer than it need be, so intense that one has to cheat to win (as ResistanceIsFeudal puts it), once the lower and middle classes become convinced that the life worth leading is the opulent one of an oligarch.

“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.

Funny thing is, however, the realization that the pursuit of elite status, if not entirely futile, is certainly difficult enough to demolish happiness, does little to alleviate the situation, because built into the ideology of upward mobility is an ingenious fail-safe that only serve to prod middle-class strivers harder. “We are … balancing a contradiction in our minds; the oligarchy and meritocracy coexist and we can selectively recognize evidence to support either, based on our mood and based on our situation,” continues Horning.

The ideal of meritocracy lingers on so that it can serve to always plant that doubt in the minds of the nonelites: “Perhaps the social structure is rigged for the benefit of elites, but you could have tried harder, you could have done more, as other aspirants before you were able to do.” It’s always there to help us redirect our discontent at ourselves.

In an article appearing in the September 2009 issue of Harper’s (also cited in this earlier post of mine) Mark Slouka laments the current state of American universities, which with their newly established corporate structures, are decidedly in the business of reproducing the “trying-harder” meme. Education in America today is almost exclusively about the GDP,” Slouka writes,

It’s about investing in our human capital, and please note what’s modifying what. It’s about ensuring that the United States does not fall from its privileged perch in the global economy…. Management has decided that the new business plan has no room for frivolity. Those who can justify their presence in accordance with its terms may remain; the rest will be downsized or discontinued.

The corporate killing-floor certainly is undoubtedly a bloody place, but these days I see the greater problem as not that universities have subscribed to the mentality that its primary function should be investing in human capital. To some extent, this was probably what was always the case, only for a far smaller contingent that what makes a similar investment now. Rather the problem lies in the very idea of human capital, because this term 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.

Anton would love to hear from you. Drop him a line at generationbubble [at] gmail [dot] com.

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