Depreciation of Specific Human Capital

Every asset depreciates. Physical capital rusts, corrodes, and is eventually scrapped. Financial capital can be inflated away or devalued by a market that has changed its mind. Human capital depreciates too, though the mechanism is less visible and, for the person experiencing it, more devastating — because human capital is not something you own. It is something you are. Becker understood depreciation as a structural feature of human capital, not an accident. Skills become obsolete. Knowledge is superseded. The market's demand for a particular capacity shifts, and the person who built their identity around that capacity discovers the market no longer values what they spent a decade becoming. AI is depreciating human capital at a rate without precedent in the modern economy — not because AI is smarter than humans, but because AI is rendering specific forms of cognitive labor abundant.