Individual capital

Individual capital, the economic view of talent, comprises inalienable or personal traits of persons, tied to their bodies and available only through their own free will, such as skill, creativity, enterprise, courage, capacity for moral example, non-communicable wisdom, invention or empathy, non-transferable personal trust and leadership.

Individual talent & initiative was recognized as an intangible quality of persons in economics back to at least Adam Smith. He distinguished it (as "enterprise") from labour which can be coerced and is usually seen as strictly imitative (learned or transmitted, via such means as apprenticeship).

Marxist economics refers instead to "an individual's social capital - individuals are sources neither of creativity and innovation, nor management skill. A problem with that analysis is that it simply cannot explain the substitution problem and lack of demand that occurs when, for instance, an understudy takes on a leading role, or a second author takes over writing a popular book series. At the very least there must be some conditional, if not firm-specific then "class specific", special ability to command premiums for outstanding personal performance.

Neoclassical economics by contrast refers to "the individual in whom the human capital is ... embedded", which implies a strong association of the individual with the instructional capital they learn from, with little or no social capital influence. This is orthogonal to the Marxist view, but not necessarily opposed.

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