Debates about San Benito County’s future development, such as occurred place at this week’s special meeting of the board of supervisors, usually focus on land use and economics measuring their effects in traffic jams and potential dollars moving in and out of the county coffers. Rarely, if ever, do we discuss the benefits generated by human capital, yet the products of human capital – not the mere impact of human existence – have the greatest influence on our lives.
Every tool we use from a wrench to a jackhammer, from a cell phone to a Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine; every piece of art and entertainment we enjoy, ponder, or explore including music, paintings, novels, and baseball; every house, road, sewer line, university, and can of paint came into being or was put into place due to the thoughts and labors of human beings.
Even our interface with the natural world has often benefited from human capital. We talk a lot about preserving prime farmland, but farming as a business is a human, not natural, enterprise. Orchards are often the result of the natural world improved by humans resulting in better quality and higher yields.
The so-called environmentalists too often undervalue human contributions and more important, the potential of those who have not yet matured or arrived. No one can predict who will be next great inventor, entrepreneur, scientist, writer, athlete, artist, doctor, philosopher, actor, leader, father or mother among the millions of endeavors that all originate from human capital. To name any specific person in the past or present would surely slight many others; their accomplishments – and our collective accomplishments – speak for them.
Given their head and a need to excel, humans acting together and independently, building on the knowledge and accomplishments, and even the failures of other humans, have produced a wondrous world – so wondrous that we regularly take its benefits for granted. As we look at other humans, we too often see only the burdens they might represent, the resources they will use, the roads they will crowd, and the longer lines at the ATM. We have a very hard time seeing the diseases they will cure, the lyrics they will pen, or the worlds they will explore.
When Neil Armstrong was born in Auglaize County, near Wapakoneta, Ohio, on August 5, 1930 no one could have predicted that almost 39 years later he would be the first human to walk on the moon using the concepts, technology and machinery conceived of and produced by tens of thousands through many generations.
Do you remember the name of the astronaut who stayed in the command module of Apollo 11 while Armstrong and Aldrin visited the moon? It was Michael Collins and they could not have done the mission without him. So it goes with human capital, we rarely know a lot about those who are not the faces of accomplishment, but they are there doing their part.
Besides the predictable convenience and economic difficulties and benefits, development brings with it human capital – workers, ideas, talent, knowledge, and most of all, potential and opportunity.
Potential and opportunity are the springboards to accomplishment. Without them, we would still be living the short and difficult lives of so many previous generations.
