It can be confusing talking to experts and specialists, because they have developed and employ a specialist vocabulary in order to be able to communicate with each other in a precise and compact manner. Unfortunately, amateurs and bad ‘experts’ – people of low quality, basically, who nevertheless have attained some position of respect in their field – can also employ jargon, and while experts in that domain of expertise will come to understand that these people are fakers fairly quickly, those of us who are not experts can often find the jargon impenetrable enough that we can’t assess the particular people using the jargon with any confidence.
But jargon must be precise and accurate, and I think we can designate Kevin Hassett as an amateur based on this recent pronouncement of his:
Senior White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Sunday that America’s “human capital stock” is ready to get back work as the country takes steps toward reopening.
On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Hassett discussed future unemployment and America’s readiness to lift measures put in place to tackle the coronavirus spread.
“Our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed. Our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises,” Hassett said. [BusinessInsider]
This rhetorical blunder has caused consternation and outrage for its callousness from many people (see my initial source on The Daily Kos if you need a ration of mostly liberal, highly justified outrage), but I’d like to draw attention to the scholarly academic implications of Human capital stock.
Human, in this context, is a modifier indicating the domain to which this description applies.
Capital refers to a resource.
Stock? A fungible (i.e., no individual identities) collection of units.
Getting by the dehumanization of the work force that is so implied (another step beyond Human Resources, for those few of us who still remember that Human Resources used to be Personnel), this abstraction of the work force is inaccurate. Why?
Resources are passive in the usual sense, such as mineral resources.
And human stock is not, like cattle, best characterized by a single, dominant attribute (“nutritious”). It is not, in a word, fungible. Humans have a diverse set of talents, skills, willingness to work, need to work, intelligence, motivations, and many other attributes which render them – ME! – a creature which must be regarded not with care, not with a measuring stick, but with … RESPECT.
But Human capital stock has a real expert ring to it, now doesn’t it? The psychology behind its use centers on the user. Because it’s an unusual phrase, it marks the user as an expert, as someone Who Has Studied the Subject. Or so they’d like you to think. Respect the dude, eh?
But, as we’ve seen, it’s a profoundly inaccurate bit of jargon to use. If it’s rampant in economic circles, it should be expunged after various and horrible rituals. I mean, as an engineer, I can go to enormous lengths to be accurate, even in something as trivial as a variable name.
And, I’ll tell you, Mr. Hassett’s phrase really caught my attention as a big ol’ red flag that this guy shouldn’t be trusted in matters economic. It’s horrendously inaccurate description of the work force is gob-smacking. And he’s exhibiting the behavioral characteristics that are congruent with just about all Trump advisors and appointees – second- and third- raters who long for respect that they never seem to get.
Much like their boss.
So, when you see Mr. Hassett pounding the lectern and trying to be profound, listen with a lot of skepticism.
