Capital Theory
| Lecture handout: Capital theory* |
Textbook Reading: Chapter 6
There is still a website containing the “Millennium Dome Collection”, but this Guardian article provides a thorough retrospective.
Here is the video of the Sinclair C5 Infomercial:
- Further reading: James, D.N., 2002, “The Trouble I’ve Seen” Harvard Business Review
For a book length treatment of the concept of intangible capital see:
- Haskel, J. and Westlake, S., 2017, Capitalism without capital, Princeton University Press
For a nice attempt to avoid treating intangibles as a residual, or less clear category and a meaningful attempt to conceptualise and study them see:
- Crouzet, Nicolas, Janice C. Eberly, Andrea L. Eisfeldt, and Dimitris Papanikolaou. 2022. “The Economics of Intangible Capital.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 36 (3): 29-52.
They argue that intangibles require a storage medium, where “The medium can be a piece of physical capital, like a computer (for software), or a document (for a patent or a design), or a person (for a method or an innovation).” This need for a storage medium implies two things:
- Non-rivalry in use
- Limited excludability
They argue that, “the extent to which these properties generate a valuable intangible asset— which motivates investment—depends on the properties of the storage technology, and the resulting non-rivalry and excludability, and the institutions that enforce property rights.”
Here is a lovely list of repurposed American gas stations.
For more on business plan ecology, see
- Beinhocker, E.D., 2006, The Origin of Wealth Harvard Business School Press
- Moore, J., 1993, “Predators and Prey: A New Ecology of Competition” Harvard Business Review
| Learning Objectives: To understand what capital goods are
Spotlight on sustainability: Look at instances where resources have been reconfigured for alternate uses |