On meaning and significance:

(1) Social scientific categories have world-making effects.

(2) 'Human capital' invokes and invites us to inhabit a world. It calls a world into being. It is part of an assemblage of terms that shapes the cultural order of values.

(3) Human capital invokes an order of values that is inferior to alternatives; but...

(4) its effects are multi-dimensional. In the anti-tax, anti-state neoliberal context, it has been a keystone of research that supports public funding for health and education.

(5) In general, the use of 'human capital' in the public sphere is worth resisting, worth mocking. It's probably not outrageous. It's probably not worth being outraged about.

(6) Particular uses of an anodyne term can be offensive, even deeply offensive.

i. It's like, if your mother was sick in the hospital, and she got better, and you called your friend to tell her, and she responded "I guess her human capital is ready to get back to work!" you would probably not keep her as a friend.

ii. Even if you think 'human capital' is fine, the conflation of the human agent with their economic capacity grates on us: in our common sense morality the _people_ are ready, eager to do things, not their capital. People have intentions, capital does not

iii. And even if you think, w/ Marx, that, having become capitalists, an individual's agency becomes harder to disentangle from their capital, then you can still be offended by the idea of the collective, aggregate 'human capital stock' having the agency, not the individual

(7) Now, the observant reader will note that what is distasteful about Hassett's usage lines up precisely with what is politically objectionable to the colonization of our life-world by 'human capital' and its associated conceptual apparatus

I would like to apologize to my regular readers for how few typos I slipped into this thread.