Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

JOHANNA OKSALA
been given ad hoc interpretations or had baffled investigators. Becker, for
example, refers to well-known phenomena such as the fact that earnings
typically increase with age at a decreasing rate, and that unemployment
rates tend to be negatively related to the level of skill. 21 The idea of human
capital explains such phenomena by treating behavioral choices such as
education and on-the-job training as investments made in people. People
enhance their capabilities as producers and consumers by investing in
themselves. The many ways of doing this include activities such as
schooling, training, medical care, vitamin consumption, acquiring information
about the economic system, and migration. 22
These investments result not just in some incalculable increase in the
individual’s wellbeing but also in a calculable increase in his or her income
prospects. From the worker’s point of view labor comprises capital: it is
ability, skills that can be acquired at a cost. Human capital comprises both
innate and acquired elements. While the innate elements are largely out of
our control, the acquired elements are not. If we make educational investments
we can become ability machines producing income (BB, 244).
The most striking example that Foucault discusses is the mother-child
relationship (BB, 229-230, 243-244). A neoliberal economic analysis would
treat the time the mother spends with the child, as well as the quality of the
care she gives, as an investment that constitutes human capital and on
which she can expect a return. Investment in the child’s human capital will
produce an income when the child grows up and earns a salary. Similarly,
economic analyses of marriage could be read as attempts to decipher what is
traditionally considered non-economic social behavior in economic terms.
Social relationships could be considered forms of investment: there are
capital costs, and returns on the capital invested.
The theory of human capital represents one striking example of the
extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain: it
makes possible a strictly economic interpretation of a whole range of
phenomena previously thought to be non-economic. Neoliberalism, understood
as a specific form of governmentality, requires that economics can
21 See Gary Becker, “Investment in Human Capital: A Theoretical Analysis,” The Journal
of Political Economy, Vol. 70, No. 2 (1962), Part 2: Investment in Human Beings, 10. See
also Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference
to Education (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1964), and Theodore
W Schultz, “Reflections on Investment in Man,” The Journal of Political Economy, Vol.
70, No. 2 (1962), Part 2: Investment in Human Beings, 1-8.
22 See e.g. Schultz “Reflections on Investment in Man,” 2, and Becker “Investment in
Human Capital,” 9.
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