Sunday, April 11, 2010

This I Believe - Financial Capital Vs. Human Capital



In the U.S. the highest compensation is paid to people to whom we entrust our financial capital: investment bankers.

Compare this to the compensation paid to the people to whom we entrust our human capital: teachers.

It is exactly upside down.

The world has gone coco for cuckoo puffs.

This I believe.

1 comment:

  1. Investing in human capital can also be applied to the national deficit. Republicans consider all expenditures by the gov't to be "spending" - kind of like a family that spends on, say, a luxury cruise, once the trip is over you have little to show for it. But not all family spending is the same - if you buy a car and use the car to go to school or to go to work then it is really "investing" not spending and will yield (over time) more than the cost in terms of total benefit to the family. Same is true of government spending on education. The Chinese have figured this out and are rapidly eclipsing us - (60% of the student population at UC Berkeley is Asian because by law they can not use any racial quotas in the CA state schools admissions. Unless the US invests a lot more in education soon (unlikely) I think the country will, over time, fall way behind in the world. I will go out on a limb and predict that in 20 years we will have a President of the US who will be fluent in Chinese (I am thinking it may be John Huntsman former governor of Utah and now the US ambassador to China (appointed to that position by Obama).

    ReplyDelete

Followers

 
Add to Technorati Favorites