Living Capital Metrics

Sustainability Metrics

Emerging Eco-Economies

Technical Background

How many capitals?

Get Involved

Get Started

Tutoring and Consulting

For more information

Free sample data analysis

About William

William's blog

Research papers

Photo gallery

Measurement and Capital

Capital theory

What is living capital?

Contrasting dead and living capital metrics

Equilibrium or nonequilibrium models?

Media and messages

How to bring capital to life

The philosophy of living meaning

The wisdom of crowds

A mathematical definition of capital

Reference list

The key difference between fungible and unfungible capital is in the way it is represented. Capital is brought to life to the extent that its value is transparently and transferably represented in documentation. When clear titles, common currencies, or other evidence of ownership are uniformly produced and universally accepted, they are sufficient to the tasks of proof or collateral in financial institutions and courts of law.

To be successful, capitalism depends on the existence of an economic infrastructure with legal and financial institutions capable of supporting entrepreneurial cycles of investment. In keeping with the shift from mechanical to organic metaphors, the infrastructure is better conceived as an ecological web of relationships. In these relationships, the social capital values of trust, loyalty, and commitment are paramount.

The irony here is that manufactured capital and property are usually represented with transparent and transferable metrics, which bring these inanimate forms of capital to life, economically speaking, while natural, human, and social capital are represented with obscure, locally-dependent metrics, rendering them economically dead.

Note that inanimate forms of capital usually are effectively brought to life in their media of representation. They aren't always. For instance, in many countries it is incredibly difficult to obtain legal title to property, and so the value of people’s homes cannot be put to work in establishing small businesses. The conservatively estimated value of dead capital resources lying unleveraged globally in Third World and former communist countries is astronomical.



And not all human capital assets are expressed in nontransferable media and metrics. The Lexile Framework for Reading (http://www.lexile.com), for instance, functions as an effective unification of 1) reading ability metrics, given that many different reading tests and general ability examinations report Lexile measures for more than 20 million US students every year; and 2) text reading difficulty estimates, with more than 100,000 books and tens of millions of magazine articles in English and Spanish all having Lexile measures. Thousands of teachers in North America and Australia use Lexiles to inform reading instruction by matching students' reading ability measures with book and article reading difficulty measures. See the Lexile web site for more information, product availability, and research on this measure of literacy capital.

Copyright 1995-2023
Living Capital Metrics
Last updated 10 January 2023.
Creative Commons License
LivingCapitalMetrics.com by William P. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.

     
          View William P Fisher Jr's profile on LinkedIn
       
   

Measures for Managing Living Capital