"Not you alone, but with the state and so on"

This is how Gary Becker concludes his impromptu remarks at a May 2012 University of Chicago seminar (set up by Bernard Harcourt [1] with François Ewald [2]) on Foucault's reading in Birth of Biopolitics[3] of Becker's human capital theory[4].  

Or if I look at the United States, how can I understand what young African-American men are doing? To me, this theory—and I’m not saying I fully understand what they’re doing—but the theory says, well, they have a lot of different options available.

What we’re pointing out to them is, if you drop out of high school in the United States, you’re pretty much destined to be unemployed, to have low earnings, to be in poor health, to have low marriage rates, and the like. That’s what the theory points out to them. And what it then points out to them is that you can overcome that in various ways. Not you alone, but with the state and so on.

 Discussion and notes below the fold.

If you don't look to the political economy of human capital, that is, "the state and so on," Becker's discussion of "options" and what you're "destined" to have happen, can end up being appropriated into some bogus "culture of poverty" stuff, blaming folks for their bad choices, etc.  

So we have to pay attention to the state in discussing human capital. And when we look to the state's investment and disinvestment in human capital in the last few decades of American society, Harcourt finds that: 

... once we all have bought into the notion of human capital, once it is part of our collective imagination, it then produces these policies of growth that involve investing in some populations and not in others. There are populations that are not worth investing in. And so I think that that is what would tie ... to a potential critique of our current condition in the United States; of mass incarceration for example which represents a particular disinvestment in a certain population, particularly young African-American men from the ghetto who are incarcerated. 

... we have completely disinvested from educational programs, from rehabilitative programs, from all forms of human capital investment. And at the same time, it represents an investment in other populations, for instance the population of the class of guard labor in a particular county. Guard labor serves a welfare function and represents an investment in human capital. You can see this through mass incarceration which would be one example; public housing and the demolition, or current state, of public housing in a city like Chicago could be another example of investing in certain human capital and not in others. 

Looking to the middle classes and substituting an individualizing economistic perspective for that of the political economy perspective, then you would be tempted to think individual investing in human capital for a later payoff is the bottom line for higher education. If so, then you won't be happy with Paul Krugman letting the cat out of the bag with regard to the stagnation in the "college premium." 

NOTES

[1] Harcourt's new book, The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order, is well worth the read.

[2] This recent Journal of Modern History article discusses Ewald's career [h/t Kevin Thompson].

[3] Obligatory self-promotion: here's an essay of mine on Foucault's work from 1975-1979; here's an outline of BB.

[4] This recent post at Crooked Timber discusses the question of "pre-distribution" aka investment in human capital via the state.