''INVENTION" OF HUMAN CAPITAL AND INVESTMENT IN HUMAN CAPITAL

\This paper discusses the dilution of the conceptual border between "consumption" and "investment". We argue that it is a key element for the understanding of capitalism in its current stage and the values guiding contemporary society. Some concepts created by the Human Capital Theory - an economical theory from the 60s-are spread out today by doctrines of business administration as values that guide the behavior of the individuals. This yields to a conceptual-axiological shift from consumption to investment that allows unusual forms of "delaying satisfactions consuming now". The diffuse area that is created between "consumption" and "investment" helps to understand how the protestant ethic of work (described by Max Weber at the beginning of the 20th Century) is reedited as an "ethic of entrepreneurial work", this is, of work understood in terms of "individual enterprise".