Comment by IAmBroom
4 months ago
Claiming "access to healthcare" is capital is a novel idea. It's a social infrastructure. It doesn't directly lead to production, any more than lunch breaks do.
Capital is not simply "anything that I can tie to improving my work output".
If you view the humans actually producing stuff as human capital, which many economists have done, then keeping that (human) capital in decent enough form by allowing it to have access to decent enough healthcare is a logical step forward.
We could then go a step or two forward and posit that a sick populace means a sick consumer class means reduced demand for goods that generate growth, but those are just details.
nobody does. which is ironic since root for capital is latin for head count.
Gary Becker famously did, a fellow Nobel laureate. Granted, I haven’t kept pace with the latest in economics, it could be that is has become all mathematicised by this point, which is par for the course for this dismal science.
1 reply →