Contemporary homo oeconomicus has become financialized human capital

Evidence

Thirty years ago, at the dawn of the neoliberal era, homo oeconomicus was still oriented by interest and profit seeking, but now entrepreneurialized itself at every turn and was formulated as human capital. As Foucault puts it, the subject was now submitted to diffusion and multiplication of the enterprise form within the social body. Today, homo oeconomicus maintains aspects of that entrepreneurialism, but has been significantly reshaped as financialized human capital: its project is to self-invest in ways that enhance its value or to attract investors through constant attention to its actual or figurative credit rating, and to do this across every sphere of its existence. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 52

Categorization

• DEFINE: Tracks the historical shift in the subject-form from trader to pleasure-maximizer to entrepreneur to financialized capital.
• XREF: connects to: Human experience becomes capital’s next frontier after geography and nature — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 596; Financial deregulation reframed poverty as a deficit of individual human capital investment. — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 200; The human-capital concept entails that education is a consumer good, not transformative experience — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 168 (+8 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal states shift the cost of reproducing human capital onto individuals #expands (0.82) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 72
• The figure of homo oeconomicus changes shape across centuries #expands (0.80) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 52
• Neoliberalism redefined human being itself as human capital. #qualifies (0.80) — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 134
• Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162