The modern global Brain Economy puts a premium on individual brain skills, but even more importantly, it demands the networking of individual brains to communicate and work together; this requires social intelligence resting on interpersonal skills and social perception and related abilities.
Brain and human capital emerged as the connecting fabric for re-imagining Africa, during a Webinar organized on Monday by Lamprace.
In a lead presentation, Dr. Graham Hart, key facilitator, stated that the jobs of the future, for which we must prepare today, will increasingly value an individual’s cognitive, emotional, and social brain resources. This is particularly important given that pressures on present-day jobs will emerge through the vast infusion of artificial intelligence and robots into workplaces and economies around the world requiring new workplace and brain function skills.
Dr. Hart enlightened the audience that the concept of Brain Capital was first articulated in 2011 by the Canadian-led Global Business and Economic Roundtable on Addiction and Mental Health. Its core aim is to drive innovation in a Brain Economy by optimizing employee brain health and performance.
Brain Capital was originally conceptualized to break down siloes between academia and the business sector recognizing that the reductionist approach to mental illness has largely failed, and that the brain is an embodied organ within biological, social, cultural, ecological, and economic contexts.
The immediate economic lesson of COVID is that we need a clearly articulated action plan that extends and expands the existing Brain Capital model.
Human capital, in itself, is concerned with the aggregate levels of education, training, skills, and health in a population that, in turn, affects the rate at which technologies can be developed, adopted, and employed to increase productivity.
Currently, there is a relative paucity of investments in health- and education-related drivers of human capital. This underinvestment in human capital is typical of the chronic underinvestment in brain health research and care.
In response to the current massive underinvestment in the potential of human capital and its central role in the digital economy, the World Bank recently introduced its Human Capital Project. The project seeks to “understand the link between investing in people and economic growth, and to accelerate financing for human capital investments.”
Another facilitator, Mr. Muniru Hameed, highlighted the need to document, preserve and disseminate indigenous technical knowledge, ITK. ITK refers to knowledge about the local environment that is produced, held, and used by indigenous peoples and communities.
Indigenous Technical Knowledge, ITK, is the actual knowledge of a given population that reflects the experiences based on tradition and includes more recent experiences with modern technologies.
The acknowledgment of ITK challenges the dominance of Western science, recognizes the plurality of knowledge claims, and provides indigenous peoples with representation on resource management issues that affect their lives.
Brain Capital can use context and insights drawn from social capital, largely defined as an individual’s social relationships and participation in civic and community networks that enables society to function successfully.
Social capital can be understood as an inherent cohesive force that enables collective action within populations. With regards to mental disorders, social capital may lower risk while increasing intellectual cross-pollination, resilience capacity, successful adaptation, emotional intelligence, cooperation, and recovery.
In “The Prince,” Machiavelli had stated: ‘I have not found among my possessions anything which I hold more dear than, or value so much as, my knowledge of the actions of great people, acquired by long experience in contemporary affairs, and a continual study of antiquity.’
Indeed, the time is now for institutions and governments to adopt a Brain Capital Strategy.
Our current economy is indeed a Brain Economy—one where most new jobs demand cognitive, emotional, and social, not manual, skills, and where innovation is a tangible “deliverable” of employee productivity. With increased automation, our global economy increasingly places a premium on cerebral, brain-based skills that make us human, such as self-control, emotional intelligence, creativity, compassion, altruism, systems thinking, collective intelligence, and cognitive flexibility.
COVID has highlighted that the systems we rely on in our daily lives (e.g., international supply chains) are vulnerable to sudden and unexpected disruption beyond our control.
Economic systems need the ability to anticipate, absorb, recover, and adapt to unexpected threats. COVID has clearly highlighted a lack of resilience within our global economic systems and an economic depression or recession is likely. A systems approach is critical to prepare the global interconnected socioeconomic systems for future impacts to reduce the shock.
