Nowadays analysis point out that human beings are not “commodities” or just “resources”, but are creative and social people that make class contributions further than ‘labor’ to a society and to civilization. The wide term human capital has progressed to enclose some of this complexity, and in micro-economics the term “firm-specific human capital” has come to stand for a meaning of the term “human resources.”
The discuss about “human resources” versus human capital thus in a number of ways echoes the debate concerning natural resources versus natural capital.