Double or Nothing

Of all the phrases to gain traction in our language in recent times, is any uglier than “human capital”? Even as the term suggests an imperative to nurture and educate (capital, after all, must be developed), it financializes the human. Education appears through its frame as an investment opportunity, personal life choices as a series of risk calculations. By quantifying and instrumentalizing, “human capital” impoverishes life’s complexity.

Granted, taking potshots at business language is easy and ultimately futile. Increasingly, its idioms shape our political and social imagination in ways so powerful as to appear immutable. Any dissenter is put in mind of Paul Simon’s “I Know What I Know”: “Who am I to blow against the wind?” How then, if at all, can we reckon with this twenty-­first-­century financialization of language and life? Perhaps the most interesting approach involves telling stories about it. Can we play with financialization’s dominant...