A Law for the Social Sciences Regarding Us Human Beings

Tiago Cardão-Pito

Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 2016, vol. 28, issue 2, 202-229

Abstract: This article proposes a feasible law for the social sciences asserting that we human beings are not commodities, assets, capital or resources. Mainstream economics and Marxism describe human participation in economic and societal production through a human-commodity framework. Intangible flow theory aims to replace that framework and interrelated conjectures as human capital, human assets and human resources. This theory is not exclusively applicable to capitalist/market organization forms. It suggests that (a) commodities are physical goods, and exhibit known characteristics differentiating them from human-related flows as service or knowledge flows; (b) human work has properties that make it akin to quasi-service production; (c) humans are not commodities, capital, assets or resources; (d) machines can obtain the skills necessary to replace human work or perform novel tasks when previously intangible dimensions are turned tangible (tangibilization); and (e) cash-flows generated or saved by those machines tend to flow to human beings who own or control them. According to this theory, greater attention must be paid to flows of economic material elements that display a relevant degree of empirical precision (e.g., cash and physical goods flows). JEL: A1, B1, B2, B4, B5

Keywords: Economic sociology; heterodox economics; human capital; human–commodity framework; intangible flow theory; Marxism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://jie.sagepub.com/content/28/2/202.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jinter:v:28:y:2016:i:2:p:202-229

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().