Saji K Mathew

Capital creation is dependent on energy.

Forecasts of the future are often wildly wrong, so this chapter is short to avoid making too many errors.

When most people hear the word capital they usually think of economic capital and, in particular, its financial forms such as of cash, equities, and bonds.

Agriculture society was a catalyst for capital creation. Society became more structured because a degree of continuing leadership and organization is required for farming. Farmers were entrepreneurs. They needed to plan, acquire resources, and develop procedures for seeding, harvesting, and threshing grains. In other words, they had to create organizational capital to manage their farms.

Humans are a biologically evolved social species with advanced cognitive skills. While there are a number of social species, such as ants, humans are the most sophisticated in terms of creating societies. All species have some cognitive skills (e.g., a plant senses sunlight and orientates toward it), and some have very specialized skills (e.g., echolocation in bats). Humans, however, have the most advanced cognitive skills. We have jointly applied our social and cognitive skills over millions of years to create the sociotechnical systems that dominate today’s world and are responsible for our capital creation system.

Social capital is the set of relationships, shared values, culture, and context that support group cohesion, trust, and teamwork in a society or organization.

Natural capital is the earth’s endowment. Some of this bounty is finite, such as the different types of minerals, and some renewable, such as forests. Renewable resources are all powered directly or indirectly by solar energy, and they are a valuable annuity for all life on earth.

Symbolic capital consists of elements, such as brands, prestige, status, and reputation, that distinguish a person, organization, city, region, or country. Generally, entities aspire to have a positive image and a high level of symbolic capital in their peer group.