''In Foucault’s 1978-1979 lecture series on post-war liberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics, he spends an extended period of time looking at the theory of “human capital” which he describes as representing two processes. The first process is the extension of economic analysis into “previously unexplored” domains. The second, on the basis of the first, is the process that provides a strictly economic interpretation of what was previously considered non-economic. Peculiar to neoliberal economics is this renewed focus on labor. “American neoliberals say this: It is strange that classical political economy has always solemnly declared that the production of goods depends on three factors—land, capital, and labor—while leaving the third unexplored” (Foucault 2004, 219). Human capital, clearly, is a “very illiquid asset” (Becker 1993, 91). There is also a long window of time, filled with innumerable variables, before a return on investment can even be meaningfully expected. This makes any given investment in human capital relatively difficult to make informed observations about.

There is an informational gap.

This entrance of economic interpretation into what was previously considered non-economic, coupled with a shift in risk analysis regarding human investment, also results in an alteration of the understanding of labor and the capital of the worker. This capital is “the set of all those physical and psychological factors which make someone able to earn this or that wage”. On the one side, labor comprises a capital which can be best understood in this liberal economic discourse as a series of skills, capacities, and abilities; “as they say: it is a ‘machine’” (Foucault 2004, 224). On the other side, there is an earnings stream or a set of wages. With this machinic conception of the worker’s skill deployed in neoliberal economics—which Foucault will describe as a return of the classical homo oeconomicus—comes a new kind of focus on the worker themselves. “In reality, this machine has a lifespan, a length of time in which it can be used, an obsolescence, and an aging” (Foucault 2004, 225).

The new figure of the neoliberal policymaker must be concerned with everything from the genetic makeup of a worker to the amount of time spent in their mother’s arms to the color of the classroom walls they were educated in – it is all valuable knowledge for the complicated and risk-heavy investment in refining and improving a given subject’s human capital (Foucault 2004, 229). Foucault notes this disturbing element in neoliberal economics: “we can see through anxieties, concerns, problems, and so on, the birth of something which, according to your point of view, could be interesting or disturbing” (Foucault 2004, 227).

This new approach to labor produces a new approach to risk. “[W]e can identify what individuals are at risk, and what the risks are of unions of individuals at risk producing an individual with a particular characteristic that makes him or her the carrier of a risk” (Foucault 2004, 228). For Foucault, the neoliberal government of risk is always searching to make new analytic alliances, to expand the communication of inputs that produce particular individuals with particular traits and modes of behavior.

The assemblage theorist’s and political ecologist’s call for an expanded communicative polity is not only entirely compatible with this form of sovereign extensionism but produced by it entirely. “This means we arrive at a whole environmental analysis, as the Americans say, of […] life which it will be possible to calculate, and to a certain extent quantify, or at any rate measure, in terms of the possibilities of investment in human capital” (Foucault 2004, 230). The interconnective nature of etiological pursuit is not a coincidence, it is entirely central to the eugenic impulse of neoliberalism. Foucault summarizes the danger this way:

[A]s soon as a society poses itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in general, it is inevitable that the problem of control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction, will become actual, or at any rate, called for.

(FOUCAULT 2004, 228)

Through this framework of human capital, a series of capacities and abilities, turns homo oeconomicus into an “abilities-machine”. The eugenic biopolitical impulse that underwrites the process to refine and improve human capital is fundamental to the function of neoliberalism. The model of centering risk does not just preclude catastrophe, but it also lends flexibility to a given governmentality that needs to reorient itself around new conditions''.

Will Conway