Continuations

More on how we are not constrained by capital in meeting our needs. The previous post covered discharge (yuck) and temperature. All of this is part of the continued rewrite of the Appendix of my book The World After Capital. Pressure. Anybody who has gone diving will be aware that our bodies do not handle increased pressure very well. The same goes for decreased pressure, which is one of the reasons why we find air travel exhausting (airplane cabins maintain pressure similar to being at the t...

Today I am continuing my examination of whether or not capital is the binding constraint for meeting humanity’s needs. The prior post looked at our needs for calories and nutrients. Discharge. We also need to get things out of our bodies by expelling processed food, radiating heat and exhaling carbon dioxide. Humans have made a great deal of progress around meeting our discharge needs, such as toilets and public sanitation. Building public sanitation systems is one of the major contributors t...

Today I am continuing my examination of whether or not capital is the binding constraint for meeting humanity’s needs. The prior post looked at our needs for oxygen and water. Calories. To power our bodies, adults need between 1,500 and 3,200 calories per day, a need we mainly meet by eating and drinking. The best way to obtain calories, however, is surprisingly poorly understood – the mix between proteins, lipids and carbohydrates is subject to debate. Eating food is the primary solution to ...

This is the third part of a rewriting of the appendix to The World After Capital. In the first part, I provided evidence on the tremendous growth of physical capital over the past one hundred years. The second part dealt with looking at World War II production as an indication for how much excess capital we have above what we need to meet our needs. Now comes a more specific examination of our needs with regard to the sufficiency of capital. The overall physical capital statistics provided ea...

In last week’s post, I provided some data on how much physical capital has grown in the last one hundred years. When measured by certain proxies, such as the production of steel, it looks like about a 30x growth in the last 100 years and nearly 100x if you go back just two decades further to 1900. We also saw that significant growth has occurred since World War II, which as a first approximation is at least a 10x growth. Now someone might suggest that this growth could all be due to the popul...

In a push to wrap up my book The World After Capital to a point where I will make a print copy available, I am finally tackling the appendix one more time. The goal of the appendix is to provide more data to show that physical capital is no longer humanity’s binding constraint. Or in the language of the book, the goal is to show that physical capital is sufficient. The plan of attack is as follows. I will first be pulling together some general data on global physical capital (this is today’s ...

In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set of technologies (planting, irrigation, domestication of animals, etc.), invented roughly 10,000 years ago, the constraint shifted from food to land in what became the Agrarian Age. Then only a couple ...

There are many terrific analyses of the WeWork IPO filing out there. One thing I have not read is someone pointing out how there is a possibility that this all works, despite the hokum language and the eye popping capital requirements, simply because we have created $3 trillion more dollars in the US alone (with equally massive central bank money creation in Europe and in China). On my blog I have been complaining about valuations as far back as I can remember but when interest rates approach...

NOTE: Today’s excerpt from my book World After Capital deals with how we have achieved the sufficiency of physical capital. This is capitalisms greatest accomplishment, but also means that we are now facing a new scarcity: attention.CapitalThe title of the book is World after Capital. One of my fundamental claims is that capital is no longer scarce. There is enough capital in the world to meet everyone’s basic needs. That means meeting the individual needs of 7 billion or more people, the col...

Capital is no longer scarce. This is an assertion I made a while back in my post “Land, Capital, Attention: This Time it Is the Same.” Today I want to elaborate on that a bit. Estimates put global investible capital at north of $100 trillion. Global GDP by comparison is around $80 trillion and as an approximation global gross output is likely around $160 trillion. It is important to keep in mind that the capital needed to just operate a steady state economy is meaningfully less than gross out...