Talk:Capital (economics)

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NPOV dispute courtesy of user:The Anome from wikipedia:pages needing attention. I'm not an economist, so I make no judgement... :-/ Martin

So far as I can tell, the following is not a grammatical sentence: "The Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk maintained that capital intensity within a certain industry as determined by consumer demand rather than the supply of saving, through the roundaboutness of production processes." Perhaps the "as" (after "industry") should be "was".

Contents 1 References, please! 2 Real Capital 3 classical explanation 4 mergefrom Risk capital 5 Land 6 Financial Capital 7 Picture? 8 Ghandi quote?

[edit] References, please!

I'm concerned about a lot of the material in this article and related articles, in particular the analysis of the six "styles of capital". Every reference I can find to this analysis is sourced back to the same person, Craig Hubley. Hi!!!!not an economics professional, but rather someone who likes to post his ideas up on the internet. Unless the information can be backed up by a source other than Craig Hubley, it needs to go; an encyclopedia is not the place for articles that describe the ideas of one individual, where that individual is not well known.

Enchanter 10:34, May 28, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry but that is really serious witch hunting. A lot of the assertions in this article are just regular stuff, and several names are mentionned as reference. If you object to one specific point, please do so, but just deleting the article because of its author is not reasonable. SweetLittleFluffyThing

Yes, there is plenty of stuff in there which is regular stuff, and I'm not suggesting for a moment that the whole article is deleted. But some of the material here is very dubious. I can find no analysis referring to "styles of capital" in any economics reference, or anywhere on the internet (other than by or sourced to Mr Hubley), at all. The same goes for instructional capital (which I've already reduced to a stub after trying and failing to come up with anyone, anywhere, who used the term instructional capital in the same way as the article.) If you disagree with me, and think that that part of the analysis is "regular stuff", I would be interested to see references, which is why I have asked on the talk page before removing any content.

This is not witch hunt; I don't care who wrote the article. What I care about is that the article should be a high quality summary of knowledge on the subject, rather than reflecting some new research by one individual. Enchanter 20:47, 29 May 2004 (UTC)

Enchanter, I agree with you that this is a contraversial issue. When I studied economics these terms were not used as described here. However there is a legitimate literature that has developed in the last decade. For example, look at Thomas A Stewart, 1997, Intellectuall capital: The new wealth of organizations, Doubleday, NewYork. Stewart divides intellectual capital into Human capital, Customer capital, and Structural capital. The term Digital capital comes from Don Tapscott, David Ticoll,and Alex Lowery, 2000, Digital Capital: Harnessing the power of business webs, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London. Knowledge capital is from Alan Burton-Jones, 1999, Knowledge capitalism, Oxford University press, Oxford. Charles Leadbeater, 1999, Living on thin Air, Penguin, London, uses the distiction between knowledge capital, social capital, and financial capital.

The proliferation of capitals is quite recent and still very much in flux. But I do not think that this warrants there exclusion on the grounds of original research. One of the advantages of an online 'opedia is that we can deal with the state of human knowledge as it evolves.

Just one suggestion, this part of the article should be moved to Capital (business) because these new capitals originate in the management literature (both popular and academic) rather than from economics. mydogategodshat 18:39, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Real Capital

To be sure there is much yammering, posturing, and pompous rhetoric regarding the term "capital" in economics. The classical economists did not define the term well enough even though they noted the difference between land and "real capital". I wish to define this term "real capital" as a much better description of "capital" as that term relates to political economy. For now I will say that there is no such thing as "natural capital" because such a thing is included in the word land which is very much distinct from "capital".

Also there is no such thing as "infrastructural capital" unless, perhaps, one wishes to differentiate capital which is privatized from capital which is socialized.

In the discussion of "infrastructural capital" in this article we see the torturing of the concept of depreciation which ONLY APPLIES TO CAPITAL. Depreciation (actual deterioration or a wearing out) is one of the distinguishing characteristics of "capital" as distinct from land. Natural resources are depleted (e.g. oil depletion). The oil does not "wear out". Farmland can be depleted, but left alone it will recover quite naturally. Real capital is created by labor and it will "wear out" and left on its own it will rust or crumble back into the land from whence it was harvested. Such attributes are what distinquish land from real capital.

There may be such a thing as individual personal capital and it is produced by labor and owned by the laborer (e.g. the individual studied hard or trained his body) and now has the result as personal capital. If it occurs naturally within the laborer such as any natural talent we might as easily styled it as personal "land". The distinction is meaningless due to the inalienability of the asset. There is NO WAY you can deprive the baseball player or the mathematician of his abilities and then make use of these inalienable assets. The return to individual capital or individual natural resource is normally regarded as wages as opposed to interest or rent. And thus the asset is still encapsulated in the term labor as opposed to capital.

As to intellectual capital we can see this as a particular manifestation of socialized capital in that education for the masses is part of the infrastructure of the society no less than the roads and bridges.

"Natural capital" my Aunt Fanny!:) BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. :) :)

"Those are my opinions and you can't have em!" -- Bart Simpson

--The Trucker 07:26, 6 January 2006 (UTC)

I think you will find there is such a thing as natural capital and there is also a system for measuring natural capital at a national level. The system is available from the United Nations Statistics Division website in the Handbook of National Accounting: Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting 2003 (SEEA2003). It is worth noting that the SEEA is a satellite account of the System of National Accounts (SNA) which as you will be aware is the system used to calculate aggregates such as Gross Domestic Product and Gross National Product. I don't think there should be any further debate as to whether natural capital exists.

For more information see: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/envAccounting/seea.htm

Best regards - Winston

just two questions about farmland recovering quite naturally. If the land is depleted of trace minerals, what natural process recreates them? I understand that nitrogen, carbon and other nutrients will accumulate from dead plants, but these dead plants will not contain trace minerals if the minerals no longer exist in the soil, will they? If so perhaps you can cite the botanical method by which this occurs. ThanksStephenstillwell 17:20, 4 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] classical explanation

Could someone expand the definition with some real world examples or a more layman explanation.

How about this. If you go into some wooded commons and shoot some pheasants, you are living off the Land. If you apply for permission to enclose part of the same commons and start breeding pheasants to be released, and invite shooting parties who pay a fee for the shoot, you have invested some money to create an income earning capital asset. -- Janosabel 22:37, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] mergefrom Risk capital

I know nothing about this topic. Someone who does should look at Risk capital and see if the content of that article should be merged into this one, possibly then redirecting that article here. If that article is not worth keeping at all, someone could just redirect that here, and remove the "mergefrom" tag from this article. --Xyzzyplugh 11:06, 17 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Land

I don't believe that land is viewed upon as a seperate factor of production from capital any longer. In the days of Adam Smith and his contemporaries technical progress was unheard of so land was the main driving force behind sustainable wealth. In modern times, land is regarded as much less important and as such is simply viewed as a category of capital. --Skatastic

"I don't believe that land is viewed as a seperate factor of production from capital any longer."

Yes, you are referring to the dubious achievement of neoclassical economics in managing to hide Land (all nature-provided resources) "under the skirt of capital". Try building a factory or a block of flats without Land.

As to importance, try buying an acre of development land in a crowded city for less, or no more, than the cost of the building you are going to put on it. -- Janosabel 22:46, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Financial Capital

In strictly economic terms, capital does not apply to any kind of financial instrument. It seems to me that the definition of financial capital in the article is suggesting the contrary. In economics ownership is not especially important. It doesn't really matter if someone is heavily indebted to own their factors because factors of production will, in a free market, be used in the most efficient way possible, regardless of the owner or debt structure. This follows from the assumption that individuals are rational, that is it doesn't matter if someone owns a factory and pays someone else to manage it or if they lend someone the money to purchase the factory and have them pay interest. In either case the economy will produce the same widgets.

[edit] Picture?

What's with the picture? It looks sort of silly. Reminds me of BET

-Brad Kgj08 (talk) 08:42, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Ghandi quote?

It is non-standard to have a "quotations about" section. I think this is encouraged POV. 69.112.164.135 (talk) 05:20, 21 May 2008 (UTC)