Baxnet Ideas · Founder note
If Salary Is the Score, We Will Fund the Wrong Futures
TL;DR: The easiest return to measure is a higher salary. If that becomes our definition of human progress, capital will quietly teach people which ambitions are worth having.
Investing in People — Part Nine. This series began with Everyone Is Investable. Nobody Should Be Ownable.. The more recent pieces have looked at risk, selection and who should be allowed to provide support. This one returns to a question underneath all of them: what outcome are we trying to produce?
Put two hypothetical applications on the same desk.
The first person wants £10,000 to complete a cyber security qualification and make a move that is likely to increase their salary substantially. The second is a teaching assistant who wants the same amount to reduce their hours, complete a counselling qualification and work more closely with children who are struggling at school. Their pay may rise a little. It may not rise at all.
Both plans could be credible. Both could change lives. Any fund repaid through a share of future income already knows which application is easier to approve.
That does not make the fund heartless. It is trying to return capital, and salary is the cash flow available to do it. The confusion begins when the resulting ranking is described as a measure of human potential.
It is a measure of expected financial return: useful information, but a much smaller claim.
The spreadsheet is doing the job we gave it
Human capital has often been translated into earnings because earnings make different kinds of education, health and work comparable.
The World Bank’s Human Capital Index Plus, for example, links health, education and employment to expected lifetime productivity. Its scale is deliberately interpretable through likely differences in adult earnings and long-run GDP. The methodology is also clear that it does not capture every relevant aspect of human capital. It is a country-level tool with an economic purpose, not a complete account of what makes an individual life go well.
The same narrowing happens when finance reaches the person. A US Congressional Research Service paper on income-share agreements explains that risk-based underwriting can give more favourable terms to students with higher expected earnings. It also notes that those terms may influence educational and career decisions, potentially reducing entry into work that creates social benefits beyond private income. The market signal does not merely describe the options; it can change which option somebody takes.
That consequence is built into the contract. If repayments depend on salary, projected salary will shape the offer.
The danger is the language around it. A low-return application can begin to look like a low-potential person. A decision about which cash flows suit one financial instrument becomes a judgement about which future deserves to exist.
Some valuable work disappears from the payslip
Salary misses plenty of value that we already know how to recognise.
The Office for National Statistics maintains a separate Household Satellite Account because unpaid childcare, adult care, cooking, transport and other household services sit outside the usual boundary of the national accounts. It estimated the value of that work at £1.7 trillion in 2023, equivalent to 61% of UK GDP that year. The point of the account is to make substantial economic activity visible even though no salary records it.
At a personal level, somebody can reduce their salary and create more value at the same time. They might care for a parent, spend one day a week building a community service, take a less lucrative job that improves their health, or choose work that leaves them present for their children. The payslip records the reduction accurately. It simply cannot record the rest.
Nor should we try to force every part of life into a synthetic monetary value. That would give the appearance of a single objective score while hiding a long list of judgement calls underneath it.
There is a more honest precedent in public appraisal. The UK Treasury’s 2026 Green Book asks decision-makers to consider monetisable benefits, benefits that cannot be monetised, distributional effects, risk and wellbeing. It explicitly says social value is not limited to financial returns and warns that market prices may fail to represent it. The framework keeps different forms of value visible rather than pretending they are all the same number.
A market for investing in people would need similar honesty on a smaller scale.
Different futures need different money
There is an easy but unhelpful response to this problem: tell private investors to value everything society values. They cannot. If an investment is expected to replenish a fund, it needs a plausible source of return.
One instrument should not be asked to finance every worthwhile future.
An income-linked investment may suit a qualification, business or career move with a credible earnings effect. Public or philanthropic money may be the right payer when the return appears as better health, lower demand on another service or stronger outcomes for a community. A mutual fund could support benefits shared among its members. A grant or gift may be appropriate when the purpose is exploration, care or creative work without a reliable cash return.
These forms of money can sit beside one another. The teaching assistant’s plan might support a small income-linked contribution, an employer contribution and funding tied to the benefit created for children. The exact structure would depend on the circumstances and the law. What matters is that nobody quietly calls the whole thing a private investment and then acts surprised when the highest salary wins.
A grant is not an investment with a weak business model. It is a different agreement about who receives the value and who should pay for it.
The person needs a scorecard too
Before a fund assesses an opportunity, the individual should be able to describe what they are trying to change.
For one person, success may be moving from £30,000 to £50,000. For another, it may be maintaining their income while working one fewer evening. Somebody else may want a recognised qualification, a healthier working environment, a business that can survive without them for one day, or enough stability to remain in a profession they care about.
This is one useful role for a personal intelligence engine. It could help someone gather evidence about their present constraints, identify the outcome they actually want and notice when a financially attractive plan conflicts with it. During the attempt, it could keep the investor’s contracted outcome separate from the person’s wider account of what changed.
That separation matters. The fund may reasonably need evidence about course completion or eligible income. It does not therefore need a feed of private messages, family relationships, health notes and every other measure the system can infer. Nor should a private definition of a good life be converted into another underwriting score.
The personal record should help the person answer, “Did this make my life better on the terms I chose?” The investment record answers a narrower question about whether the agreed return was produced. Sometimes both answers will be yes. Sometimes they will disagree.
Say what the fund is optimising
A fund can choose to maximise financial return. It can choose to accept a lower return in exchange for reaching people conventional finance overlooks. Public capital can pay for outcomes that benefit society. Friends and families can give support whose value is mostly relational. Each is a legitimate decision when it is stated plainly.
Problems begin when a fund claims to discover human potential while reporting only salary growth. It will favour ambitions with recognisable pay rises, encourage people towards those ambitions and eventually produce evidence that they were the sensible choices. The score becomes self-fulfilling.
Salary can stay on the page with the correct label. Investors need to know whether a financial agreement works, and people often want to earn more.
When salary is one outcome rather than the outcome, we can see the futures it cannot price—and decide whether another kind of backing belongs there.