Human Capital and Development

This book asks the following incisive questions. Does the body of scholarship on the term “human capital” constitute a species of the meaning of the term “slavery,” and if so, in what way? How has the so-called capabilities approach to human development affected the scholarship of human development, in the context of curbing the catastrophic excesses of market behavior? How is it that some humans can be domesticated to create human capital for other groups of humans? To what extent can the international legal instruments effectively fight and combat child labor? How have dynastic China and India developed very long-term systems for the creation and maintenance of national human capital among its peoples? Have the state responses to pandemics been medicalized as a device for human capital maintenance, and if so, in what ways? What is the true meaning of the term “fit and proper” as it is imported into development and dissolution of human capital at the professional or “mandarin” levels of societies? Taking these questions together, the book Human Capital and Development asks this question: have national forms of slavery developed from what is now described as the capabilities approach to human development, with human domestication and child labor forming national systems of human capital formation, maintained by medicalization and controlled by judgments by authorities of fitness and propriety?