Human capital in modern society - from accumulation to waste?

The theory of human capital of Nobel Prize laureates in Economics Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker, which became the key idea of the era of the birth of the postindustrial information society in the second half of the past century, first raised the question about the special role of qualified personnel in the long-term growth of the country. Schultz stated the need to invest in the individual as a component of the aggregate, and Becker, in turn, supported this thesis with a number of calculations that demonstrated the advantages of workers with special education over their colleagues without it. In fact, this was the first publicly available confirmation of the economic efficiency of such a philosophical category as knowledge. Today, with all the variety of scientific interpretations of the term “human capital” - from the main element of the state’s wealth to the creative abilities of the individual - the concept “knowledge”, highlighted by Becker, remains its absolute center and the most important inseparable part. At the same time, just in our days, the period of seemingly marginal accumulation of human capital begins to feel, so to speak, a narrowing of its core - human knowledge. Let us try to support the stated thesis with a few convincing illustrations. Let us start with an article by the authoritative modern philosopher Haridimos T sukas (University of Cyprus), which received the unusual title “The tyranny of light: The temptations and the paradoxes of the information society” and was published in 1997. The author builds the following logical chain. In our time, the concept “information” replaces the classical definition of the term “knowledge”. Information, in turn, is now tacitly understood as a system of skills for the functional use of technologies. The instrumental ease with which such manuals are collected, processed, stored, retrieved, and distributed is a substitute, making it seem that they are objective, and therefore do not require confirmation or clarification. More than 20 years have passed since the publication of this research, let us add one more link to the chain: the readiness of the society to accept this postulate and the lack of information evidence, unconditionally acutely felt today, raise the question of a conscious social rejection of knowledge as a verifiable category. The main aim of the work is an empirical verification of the question posed in its title. In order to study the problem in depth, a questionnaire consisting of 12 closed questions was developed. The content of the questionnaire was represented by 8 situational tasks that the respondents were asked to resolve. The targeted part of the observation program included 4 factor characteristics (gender, age, occupation, educational level of the respondents) according to the research hypotheses that determine the answer to its main question. The survey was attended by 1045 spontaneous informants, whose responses revealed representative mass trends. The results of the empirical study, entitled “Decision-making mechanisms in modern conditions”, showed that, first, the overwhelming majority of the survey participants identified themselves as active supporters of self-learning in an unfamiliar field of knowledge, using data provided in the Internet. This contradicted the fact that, second, with the addition of the specified circumstances, the readiness to search for information decreased among respondents with the complication of the situational task. Third, the willingness to choose the services of a professional specialist did not show any dependence on the gender and age. Fourth, the participants with the highest predicate of received education demonstrated the highest informational independence. The empirical study was conducted in the pre-pandemic period, so the value of its results lies in a certain reflection of the degree of Russian society’s readiness to introduce restrictive measures. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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