Human capital is defined by economists as the amount of skill found in the workforce. It is “measured” as the amount of education and training of everyone. Economists also talk about investment in human capital and human capital theory. Such a “theory” highlights the expenditures made to increase the productive capacity of various workers, either through education or training.
The cost of
education and training is usually borne by everyone, but some companies do pay
their employees to invest in their own human capital and give them time off
with or without pay. Investing in a person’s ability to be more productive is important.
The
workforce quality is key to the success of any production endeavor. The west has
always had a more productive workforce because of its education and training,
among other variables.
Americans
are investing less time in technical training and more in college education
majors. The vacuum of skilled technicians is filled with labor from immigrants,
legal or illegal. Corporations hire college educated employees from India and
China simply because they pay them less.
Investment
in human capital needs to shift in the direction of vocational technology as
jobs are more plentiful in those fields and certainly pay better than the college
graduate field. Additionally, college education is getting more expensive, the average
college debt is huge and that is not the case in vocational training. College
tuition, for example, rose between 1978 and 2006 by 750 percent. (Baumol and
Blinder, p. 518, 2007 edition).
When you
consider the astronomical U.S. student loan debt of $1.75 trillion, about 44.7
million people, and the average loan debt per graduate is approximately $37,000,
it is easy to understand why a vocational training might be more beneficial for
individuals as well as for society. Student
Loan Debt 2022 Facts & Statistics | Nitro (nitrocollege.com)
There was a
time when college graduates earned twice as much as high school graduates, but the
gap is closing and compared to some college degrees in arts and education, high
school graduates with vocational training earn more.
Additionally,
higher education does not necessarily sort people by ability. Students tend to
choose easy study fields of higher education in which they have no interest in
working or jobs that may be scarce by the time they graduate and do not pay
well at all.
Since
college campuses have become bastions of woke-ism and Marxist indoctrination in
most majors, it is difficult for conservatives to blend in while seeking an education
in stem fields. Non-stem fields are teaching students what to think rather than
how to think and be creative and unique individuals in their majors.
Human
capital has shifted around the world due to the concept of globalization, its implementation
driven by the U.N., the World Economic Forum, and other elitist entities that
are in the process of breaking down borders around the world and making
sovereignty an outdated concept, a world without borders controlled by
technocratic corporations and a few elitist billionaires.
What human
capital do Europeans have? Two European think tanks, the Lisbon Council and
Deutschland Denken classified European countries by measuring the knowledge
capital and the increase or decrease in such human capital in 13 countries.
They measured capital stock, deployment, and utilization, highlighting their
ability to develop their human capital to “meet the challenge of globalization.”
The
European Human Capital Index - URENIO Watch
The study looked at the cost of all types of education and
training at learning on the job, adult education, university, primary and secondary
schooling and parental education.
-
The human capital utilization looked at how much
of a country’s human capital stock is deployed.
-
The human capital productivity measured the
gross domestic product and divided it by the human capital employed, considering
how well-educated employed labor was instead of how many hours were being
worked.
-
The study also looked at demography and
employment in reference to the demographic and migratory trends to estimate “the
number of people who will be employed or not employed in the year 2030 in each
country.”
The European Human Capital Index in 2006 found Sweden was at
the top and Germany and the Mediterranean countries at the bottom. The
European Human Capital Index - URENIO Watch
The World Bank measures and ranks a Human Capital Index in
157 countries in terms of what countries are best in “mobilizing the economic
and professional potential of its citizens and how much capital each country
loses through lack of education and health.” Human
Capital Index | DataBank (worldbank.org)
The World Economic Forum promotes the Fourth Industrial
Revolution with its deeper investment in human potential as “the most important
political, societal, economic, and moral challenges we are facing today.” The
WEF’s System Initiative on Shaping the Future of Education, Gender, and Work is
pushing an education that matches their vision for the globalist future. The
Global Human Capital Report 2017 - URENIO Watch
Investment
in human capital is quite expensive, as university tuition has increased at an
alarming rate and nobody questions why, and per capita expenditures for public
school education have expanded as well exceeding $20,000 per pupil per year in
some math and science public high schools.
The quality
of education, whether public or private, has decreased due to woke-ism
prevalent at all levels of society, to common core standards, critical race
theory curricula, the manufactured 1619 Project indoctrination, Marxist indoctrination,
and the academic and administrative obsession with pornographic sex education
starting in kindergarten, and enforced without parental consent. Sadly, only
about 25 percent of high school graduates are proficient enough in English,
Reading, Mathematics, and Science to be able to attend college.
American
education used to be the envy of the world, but many third world countries have
left most American students behind in knowledge, academic performance, and
ability to invest that knowledge productively.
Highly
educated people whose countries have invested in their college degrees often
flee political and religious oppression, war zones, bad economies, high
unemployment, and come to countries such as the U.S. that used to offer them
more economic opportunities.
If the U.S.
has a surplus of college graduates in certain fields, then the immigration of
foreign-trained professionals who will accept a lower salary that may still be
higher than in their own countries, will cause the underemployment of domestic
graduates. The home country may experience a shortage of professionals, or they
may have enough jobs to offer those who stayed.
Initially
there was brain drain from war-torn countries, from current and former communist
countries, from India, China, high achievers who were looking for the
opportunity to succeed that America offered. As this opportunity to succeed has
dried up, destroyed by the controlling political regimes in the U.S., this
brain drain has slowed down considerably.
Investment
in human capital has also changed with shifting demographics. As each family in
the developed world has less children and the replacement population rate are below
the required 2.0, the enrollment in education is dropping.
The quality
of human capital suffered with the academic concentration on less marketable
and easy college degrees like social justice, environmentalism, feminism, and
social studies, and a total lack of interest in vocational training.
There are
less Americans seeking degrees and advanced degrees in medicine, science, math,
and engineering. The void is filled with foreign students who no longer want to
stay and find jobs in the U.S. as they find life in general more restrictive in
the U.S. than in their countries of origin. Generation
Jobless: Students Pick Easier Majors Despite Less Pay - WSJ
It will be
interesting to see how Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset and his vision of the Fourth
industrial revolution with its ‘humans as hackable animals’ will play out in
reference to human capital in the next fifty years. In 2020, Klaus
Schwab said that Covid-19 was a “rare but narrow window of opportunity to
rethink, reinvent, reset our world.”
Dr. Harari,
an advisor to the World Economic Forum (WEF) said in a speech that a merger of
human life with technology “will not benefit the average man or woman so that
he or she may improve his or her own future, but that a handful of ‘elites’
will not only ‘build digital dictatorship’ for themselves but ‘gain the power
to re-engineer the future of life itself. Because once you can hack something,
you can usually also engineer it.’” Klaus
Schwab’s WEF: Humans Are Now ‘Hackable Animals that will be Re-engineered’ –
Bible Science Forum
From reader BB:
ReplyDelete"It’s become clear to me since 2009 that the Powers-that-Be no longer need our permission to go to war with anyone or anything, even us citizens- as we saw with COVID19 injections, mandates, and injuries. But they do need a means to reach inside of us to pull out either our fear, our rage, or our desire for revenge. There’s something about that energy or motivation that they seem to need for their adventurism.
On the other hand, Human Beings don't count as anything since Darwin and the Progressive movement which he helped to spawn- just look at the consequences of that. The elitists hate those who are not of their status and that is typical of human nature through the centuries. Some of the alleged greatest thinkers and influences of the19th and 20th centuries built society around the foundation that Man is an animal to be controlled and that God doesn't exist let alone belong in Society. Look at the recent history of legalized abortion and the abuses of assisted termination after illness or old age. Snap, just look at the truth about COVID19 and its "vaccines".
I believe that Human capital is meaningless in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Society is like this: elites, trained bureaucrats acting as managers and skilled labor being told to perceive themselves as superior to the remainder of society, the dregs and lab rats in the Petri dish of their experiments. With abortion, vaccines, invasion, and calculated biological warfare against your own citizens, the riff-raff will disappear. No one wants to support them, especially when all they know how to do is protest and provoke the mob."
From Denise:
ReplyDelete"Education isn’t what it used to be as the US continues to dumb down the material and student expectations.
Who will want an American doctor, engineer or architect?"
Dear Ileana,
ReplyDeleteIn Austria they told me that only 3 – 4% go to universities; most go to trade schools. In America the percentage is ~10X as many. That’s too bad, because universities have become Democratic woke centers that confuse the good children we send there, and turn most into heathens. (My four years at Notre Dame were the holiest time of my life.)
As an engineering student I spent nearly all my time in class, labs, and at my desk, doing problems, reports, and papers --- about 100 – 110 hours/week. Today one researcher found that students spend only ¼ as much: 12 hours in class and 13 hours on homework===è25/wk. But lots of time is spent watching TV, playing Internet games, and partying.
And the sad thing is that age 18-24 is the most energetic, strongest time of a person’s life. If not in college they could be working or starting small businesses!
My tuition as a freshman at ND was $600/yr. Today it is $57,000…..nearly 100 times as much! Six times the rate of inflation. And I got a terrific education (see above).
Great article!
Dave Sponseller, Ph.D.
From Bob in New Mexico:
ReplyDeleteWell, considering the WEF's well known desire to depopulate the planet and return to a royalty/serf type of economic system (the middle class, created by and enabled as it has been by capitalism, being anathema to Soros and co.) then their so-called "plans" amount to little more than lip service.
With technology replacing ever more human laborers in all walks of life, and cops and nurses being the last to be replaced in the future, I have little doubt but that our "elite betters" like Schwab and Soros and Gares envision a world in which their kingly lifestyles are supported by machines and - oh my - A.I.! - making human labor virtually unnecessary.