What Human Capital Will We Have?

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

 

 

 

Is This Our New America?

Golden Eagle with Chopped Wing
Photo: Wikipedia commons

The young woman was shopping on the 75 percent off rack of children’s clothes. Our eyes met and she smiled; in these hard times we must shop wisely to make money stretch further, she said. I remember those years in the mid-twenties, with two babies, a mom to support, and at least three part-time jobs. I never complained, blamed rich people, rioted to burn down other people’s hard work, or demanded that they turn their accumulated wealth over to me. It was a time when law and order mattered. Effort and hard work eventually paid off when I made a huge and lengthy investment in human capital – my education.

Today the only luxury the young woman allowed herself was a first baby’s Christmas ornament for her newborn. One of the only two Caucasian associates in this department store, she earns a living standing eight hours a day, waiting on demanding and often rude customers who hail from two hundred plus different countries. It is always a United Nation’s zoo, a cacophony of nationalities and people who do not have much love for America, they just enjoy its opportunities and the new found Shangri La of better treatment than poor Americans and vets get.

She has to meet impossible sales numbers set by corporate management from another planet who do not care that the economy is bad, the result of eight years of destructive Democrat Marxist activism that weakened the economy and doubled the indebtedness for generations to come. People do not have a lot of disposable income, unemployment is high, and many save money by staying home and ordering online.

Few customers want to fight the crowds and the rude salespeople who are mostly Middle Eastern and treat shoppers with contempt and rudeness just like they did in their own countries. Who wants to be friendly in a country they resent with passion? They are not even nice to the few Americans who have to work with them; they treat them like pariahs and threaten them with bodily harm if they say or do anything that might offend their Muslim sensibilities. They scream racism and bigotry for every little thing to their bosses who always take sides with the Muslims for fear that they might be considered Islamophobes. Shopping in northern Virginia is an unpleasant experience that many try to avoid.

Most of the heavily made-up Middle Eastern associates are uneducated and have no skills, they cannot possibly work anywhere else except sell merchandise in stores. There are some who do wear hijabs and some burkas. It was an interesting experience one day to go to a local computer store and to be met by an IT associate wearing a complete black tent with slits for eyes. To say that it was uncomfortable being helped by this person is an understatement. How can you relax when you cannot really see who you are talking to? I’ve seen some driving on the busy and dangerous roads of northern Virginia. I wondered if their driver’s licenses concealed their identities as well. It was an eerie experience as if I’ve been transported back in time into the seventh century slave bazaars.

I don’t know about you but I like to have a temporary friendly relationship with the person helping me spend money and, if you are rude and I can’t see you, I have to move on to shop somewhere else. But there are not many "someplace elses" left that are different from this experience.

We are fast becoming strangers in our own country, being pushed aside by a theocracy that is alien to our nation. It has not caught up yet in other parts of America but it is moving fast in that direction. If the stunt the Starbucks CEO pulled the other day, saying that he will hire 10,000 refugees from Syria instead of Americans out of work, is any indication of what is to come in the near future, our services work force will be fast replaced by laborers from unskilled nations.

There is a growing workforce in the restaurant business and landscaping, mostly people coming from south of the border, hard and conscientious workers. But they have a large family at home that takes full advantage of the generous welfare benefits in this country. This south of the border workforce has replaced high school and college students who used to work part-time to supplement their income while in school.

Collegiate Americans, lovers of activism, Bolshevism, communism, and ardent Islamophiles seem to have found a niche in the paid-protest and paid-rioters business. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), well-funded by billionaire elites, who know that global communism is best for us, remunerate these masked, black-clad agitators really well. Anti-Americanism, raised to a fever and violent pitch, has become quite lucrative. They seem to be untouched by law and order so the mayhem and destruction continues.

We are told non-stop by the main stream media that these refugees do the jobs Americans don’t want to do. Is that really true? Illegals work for lower wages, often under the table, so their employment depresses wages in general.

In between rioting, looting, burning, and physically beating people who disagree with them, Lefties keep screaming, “that’s not who we are as a nation, we are a nation of immigrants.” Yes, we are a nation of legal immigrants who assimilated into our culture, and we helped build it but we have reached our point of immigration saturation before we turn into the failed multicultural Europe that is being destroyed by the flotsam and jetsam of the welfare dependent third world.

Immigrants refuse to assimilate, we are told by the fanatical “experts” of the left, because it is “fascistic” to expect them to assimilate their “superior” and primitive culture into such an “awfully intolerant” country that took them in and supported them financially without any questions asked.

If liberals were not so “open-minded” that their brains fell out long time ago, they could perhaps answer the logical question, if we are such a racist, bigoted and intolerant place to live, why come here in the first place, why not stay in the country that is so much better than ours?

Spare us the indignity of having to support you and your extended families while you threaten us with lawsuits because we don’t accept Sharia Law over our Constitution. We are rolling out the red carpet for refugees while many of our veterans are sleeping in the streets. Is this our new America?