Intern Nation by Ross Perlin

Author:Ross Perlin
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy
ISBN: 9781844679065
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

If employers have been seduced by the prospect of getting something for free, and interns have been reconciled to free as part of a brave new economy of intense competition and altered expectations, economists see a deeper logic at work. In 1964, the young economist Gary Becker, already a rising star of the Chicago School, set out “to estimate the money rate of return to college and high-school education in the United States.” He ended up producing a highly influential attempt to “treat the process of investing in people from a general viewpoint” and popularizing the new notion of “human capital.”3 At the very moment when the federal government was making an unprecedented push for government-supported, universal higher education, conceived as a human right regardless of social class, Becker’s notion provided an explosive alternative, particularly appealing to conservatives: education and training were investments that individuals should make themselves, for rational economic reasons. With this “investment approach to human resources,” Becker even went so far as to condone, in effect, indentured servitude, practiced in colonial America and elsewhere: these servants were simply using themselves as collateral to tap the credit markets and develop their own human capital.

Becker initially focused on human capital “returns” that came in the form of higher wages, earned by college graduates from their tuition “investment” (only several hundred dollars per year at the time) and the types of training that employers offered to their workers. Today the human capital rubric extends to a tremendous range of “inter-temporal activities,” explains labor economist John Pencavel—that is to say, any situation in which an earlier investment sets the stage for later benefits, such as taking care of one’s health or migrating to another country in order to reap rewards down the line. Becker’s “seminal study,” says Pencavel, promoted “a standard way of computing the returns, the benefits, and the costs” of such investments—by the 1980s, human capital talk flavored the speeches of Ronald Reagan and justified disinvestment by governments and companies in education and training, since individuals would rationally take up the burden themselves. And indeed, if they have no other choice, many people do take up that burden.

Some interns have unknowingly embraced the language of human capital theory, asking others to invest in them when they have nowhere else to turn. Having finished her Master’s degree and struggling with student loan debt, “Stephanie” asked her extended network of friends and family to support her through an unpaid eight-month internship at the UN High Commission for Refugees in Ghana. “It was very awkward,” Stephanie told me. “I was thinking there’s no other way I can get this experience and do this, I don’t have any other option … I wrote up a letter saying what I was hoping to accomplish and why it was important, and that I couldn’t do it without help.” To her amazement, “People really opened their hearts and their wallets”—Stephanie received contributions totaling over $8,000 from forty-five different people, enabling her to take the internship.

“The human capital internship story is a very easy one to see,” says economist Greg Kaplan.

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