Beyond Valuation

It's been said that people only value things when they are, or have been, uncertain that they could actually attain them. And I think that this explains a lot about the way the modern United States works. For most Americans, the resources to build material affluence are uncertain. Circumstances change and what seemed secure one day can vanish the next. But human resources, and human potential, are so common as to be seen as free for the asking. Human capital, as it were, is overwhelmingly abundant, and that shows no sign of changing.

The United States has a rate of preventable deaths that's been calculated to be about 840 people per 100,000, and while there are initiatives to lower that, as a matter of public health, I've never heard it mentioned as an unaffordable loss of needed manpower. The deaths are a humanitarian tragedy, not an economic one.

I remember the economic boom brought about by the rapid expansion of Internet technologies into modern life, and here in the Seattle area, it caused genuine labor shortages. Restaurants had to work hard, and offer bonuses, in order to attract people to work in them, and a few that I can think of closed because they couldn't manage it. Tech companies came across as being desperate for workers, and demonstrating that one had any sort of aptitude for the work was enough to land one a decently-paying job. Now, those days are past. But even at the time, this was not a phenomenon that was spread equally around the nation as a whole. There were still depressed parts of the United States at the time, where there were more people than there was a need for labor. Technology companies may have been vacuuming up anyone who would stand still within sight of a Human Resources employee, but the unemployment rate was never at risk of dropping to zero.

For all that demographers, economists and, in some quarters, racists look at the current birth trends and foresee a future with too few people entering the labor market, the fact of the matter is that we're not making use of all of the people that who are available to work in the present. Leaving aside those who are simply unemployed, there are significant numbers of people who are underemployed, or simply not able to contribute to their full potential.

And that's unlikely to change until people really need it to. The United States, as a matter of cultural tradition, preaches a message that it up to the individual to gain the knowledge, and put in the effort, to make their best contribution to the society as a whole. When a society genuinely needs its people to get out there and make things better, it doesn't leave it up to chance like that.