What’s human capital?
To start, we need a definition. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say: “Human capital is the stock of habits, knowledge, social and personality attributes (including creativity) embodied in the ability to perform labour so as to produce economic value.” A little tricky, but basically human capital is the economic value of a person based on their skills and ability in the workplace.

So who gets paid for human capital?
In a free-market economy, everyone gets paid based on their own human capital. We each own our own skills and abilities and we collect income based on our ability and value when we work. Regardless of whether we work for a company or ourselves, we’re compensated for the value we’re able to provide.

So far so good. Now let’s tie this into investing. Without some understanding of the market, people tend to believe that they can beat the market by picking the right stocks. Consistent success (beating the market) in stock picking is actually impossible, but let’s pretend for a moment that’s not. If the market was beatable, there would naturally be people who were especially endowed with the skills and/or training to beat it. Those people would often become money managers and they would be highly sought after by the general public looking for great returns in their portfolios. But who would collect the premiums for additional returns achieved above-market returns? Stock picking would be a human capitalist skill! The brilliantly skilled money manager would collect some serious fees for his valuable ability, fees almost exactly in line with the amount of return he was able to achieve above the market. The additional return of the portfolio wouldn’t end up in the pockets of investors, it would go to the brilliant manager with the impressive human capital skills.

So here’s the point: the stock market is efficient and so it’s not consistently beatable, but even if it was, investors would not be the beneficiaries. The super-skilled money managers would rightly collect large fees, highly correlated to the additional value they were able to provide based on their human capital skills.