Human Capital and Biopolitics: Market Calculation and the De/vitalisation of Population

Abstract

Many governments and international organisations have tried to measure and enhance their so-called 'human capital' in recent years. Human capital, an idea developed by Chicago School economists such as Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, assumes that individuals possess skills and capacities that can be translated into value. Not only does it conceptualise the capabilities of the human as a set of resources, but it also presumes the human as a subject whose everyday decision making is defined by calculations of utility. In the same movement, all aspects of social life become subject to cost-benefit market calculations. By bringing together the critique of biopolitics with feminist and postcolonial theory, the papers in this panel focus on the ways in which entire populations, including their efficiency, exploitability, livability and vulnerability, are politically recast according to market logic in areas such as agriculture, corporate philanthropy, immigration and reproduction.

Title	Details
Measurement fetish: utilitarian social service and the politics of care	View Paper Details
Fitness, Class and Human Capital: Market veridiction and Echoes of Eugenics in European Immigration Policies	View Paper Details
The Sexual Politics of Human Capital Theory	View Paper Details
Farmer Suicides, Death and Neoliberal Biopolitics	View Paper Details
Interrogating the Relationship Between Corporate ‘Philanthropy’ and the Classification of Human Capability as Human Capital: A Feminist Enquiry into the Biopoliticisation of ‘Resistance’ in the Global South	View Paper Details