Rollin', rollin', rollin', keep that human capital stock rolliln'

Last weekend, while discussing unemployment on CNN - calmly discussing unemployment that may well be at 20% by fall - White House economic adviser Kevin Hasset said that “our human capital stock is ready to get back to work.” Not our fellow citizens. Not our unemployed. Not our workers. Our human capital stock. 

The concept of  human capital - defined (thanks, Wikipedia) as "the stock of habits, knowledge, social and personality attributes (including creativity) embodied in the ability to perform labour so as to produce economic value" - has been around in economic circles forever. C.f., Adam Smith. More recently, economists have won Nobel Prizes for writing about it. 

It's also big in HR and corporate learning and development circles. One of my clients is in the corporate learning biz, and I checked my files and found that I'd been writing about "human capital" for nearly a decade now. (Admittedly, it typically gives me pause. There is even a job title, "Human Capital Officer", that's sometimes used for "Chief Human Resource Officer," which is bad enough. That said, "Chief People Officer" is just a wee bit too perky and phony for my taste.) When I've written about human capital, it's all about corporations making the best use of theirs, and bringing them along by offering them goodies like development courses. 

The term's not really synonymous with workers or, in the case of my client's clients, corporate employees. But it's sometimes used interchangably, which seems ridiculously abstract when you're talking about human beings. And tag the word "stock" onto the end, and, well, it's hard not to start thinking cattle drive. As in 'keep them dogies rollin'.

And it's just stark enough to make you want to dust off the old copy of Karl Marx and see how what he had to say is holding up.

When people who work in public transportation and Walmart are dying because their human capital stock places them in positions on the front line of a pandemic, talking about workers as human capital stock seems a tad bit cold and removed. Ditto for when folks are lining up for hours in foodlines to get a carton of groceries,  and - $600 a week gravy train aside - are wondering where the next mortgage payment's coming from because they've lost their jobs.

Anyway, Kevin Hassett is an economist, and probably not much of a "people person", I'm guessing. Human capital stock is likely how he thinks of the workforce. But the last thing we need right now is another dunderheaded emissary of the Trump administration out there using words like this. 

Sure, it beats his boss libeling "Psycho Joe" Scarborough as the murderer for a twenty year old non-murder that Scarborough didn't commit. Which he couldn't because it was a non-murder to begin with. It beats Drumpf retweeting some racist, misogynist a-hole calling Stacey Abrams "Shamu" and Hillary Clinton a "skank." So there's that.

Still, given the current circumstances, human capital stock is a remarkably clumsy turn of phrase. That is, remarkably clumsy for a spokesperson for any other administration, for which nothing but nothing seems all that remarkable. (So he retweeted the guy who calls Hillary a skank. Yawn...)

Better if Hassett had actually referred to human capital stock as humans. And had talked about how, where and when our penned up human capital stock, lowing in the stockyards, will be getting back to work. He must have some ideas. I guess the closest idea might be working in meat processing plants, but that's something of a death sentence. Just what is a human capital stock to do?

Sigh...