Book contents
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 How Capitalism Saves the Environment
- 3 Capital Investments Create Their Own Political Economy
- 4 Bloated Capital
- 5 The Case for Environmental Taxation
- 6 What Should Be Taxed?
- 7 Generating Environmental Knowledge
- 8 Looking Before Leaping
- 9 Conclusion
- Index
7 - Generating Environmental Knowledge
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 How Capitalism Saves the Environment
- 3 Capital Investments Create Their Own Political Economy
- 4 Bloated Capital
- 5 The Case for Environmental Taxation
- 6 What Should Be Taxed?
- 7 Generating Environmental Knowledge
- 8 Looking Before Leaping
- 9 Conclusion
- Index
Summary
Human capital is a phrase coined by economists to describe education and training. Generally speaking, the higher the level of education, the more valuable the human capital. Indisputably, human capital is valuable, as it clearly and consistently increases human productivity. So human capital is, like physical capital, something that generates a stream of benefits, in the form of higher earnings that would not be possible without it. While human capital is most easily conceived as formal schooling or on-the-job training, there are clearly many other forms of human capital. Human capital may be the acquired knowledge of some facet of resource extraction, or some operational expertise connected to a specific industrial process. Like physical capital, human capital can be costly to acquire, not only because of direct costs, but because of the opportunity costs of time and of foregone income.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Capitalism and the EnvironmentA Proposal to Save the Planet, pp. 173 - 198Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021