The Value of the Future: The Child as Human Capital and the Neoliberal Labor of Race

“A mind is a terrible thing to waste. But a wonderful thing to invest in.” This slogan greeted pedestrians during a recent winter at a bus stop on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The bus ad was for Better Futures, a simulated stock option that capitalizes on a meta-awareness of financial capitalism’s role in the destruction of public education and the racialization of the achievement gap in the United States. The United Negro College Fund (UNCF), perhaps sensing a need to adapt to the dominant funding arrangement of the neoliberal market, has jumped into the sphere of finance—or its careful simulation. In an effort to solicit “investors,” passersby are asked to make donations to what is the latest version of UNCF’s historically important college-funding program, one adapted for the era of information capitalism by a forecasting algorithm on its website that can tell potential investors exactly how many dollars of “social return” will be produced for each dollar spent. Suggesting, in turn, that investors imagine the viral proliferation of the campaign from bus stop to Internet, the ad asks “friends” to contribute through social media, so that the future dollars on the screen can multiply precisely and exponentially (United Negro College Fund 2013).

Each “share” of Better Futures costs ten dollars and UNCF displays its simulated return value on its home page: 0.96% per dollar per annum. Despite a marketing strategy suggesting that the developing minds of children of color are really worth more “socially” than monetarily, the efficient conversion of those minds into dollars in the calculator undermines any final distinction. The simulation achieved by UNCF coincides with Marx’s (1978, 335) basic formula for capital accumulation, which financialization fully reflects: M-M’, “money which begets money.” The missing “C” here (M-C-M’), recall, is intentional. As Marx details in the first volume of Capital, the commodity can be removed to simplify the formula because its beginning and end is circulating money. Perhaps, though, the missing “C” might also be in this case the child. For Better Futures, the commodity is the cognitive capacity of children’s neuroplasticity, their capacity to learn (the “mind” that is, according to UNCF’s well-known slogan, “a terrible thing to waste”). This capacity is quantified by its projection into a probable future, stretched out as financial speculation across the life span of the child and divisible into discrete spheres by UNCF’s calculator that include not only eventual salary but also “health savings,” “crime savings,” and the nebulous “other savings” (United Negro College Fund 2013).

In speculating on the value of the future by monetizing the body and mind of the child of color, UNCF suggests that the value of the child to neoliberal capital is not identical to the idealized modern concept of childhood as a shelter from the labor market, one that took root as whiteness in the Progressive Era (see Macleod 1998). If the orphan Annie incarnates this child figure of American industrial capitalism, the vulnerable, white, and feminine future citizen who must be saved by the nation from the dehumanizing and immoral dangers of the market, she has likewise become in recent years the avatar of the reproductive futurism diagnosed as endemic to the social, most famously according to Lee Edelman, who unceremoniously declares in No Future (2004, 29), “Fuck Annie.” Reproductive futurism, for Edelman, signifies the centrality of the child figure to the social organization of time and its root value as political: the child is the emblem of the future in whose name the totality of society is contracted, a precious resource governing the parameters of public politics and private sociality to secure the welfare of tomorrow in a stable form (reproduction), consigning queerness to the purely negative. Edelman argues that only an affirmation of the fully negative, which would comprehend the annihilation of Annie and everything vouchsafed by her image, could possibly overcome the straitjacket of the future upon which she calls.¹

The savvy logic of UNCF in Better Futures signals, however, how distant...