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(General reply to sister comments)

Sounds to me like there some cross purpose debating going on here.

To me it is simple. If by "Capital" you mean "money" then of course it has no intrinsic value, it is based on faith. Zimbabwe's currency is an obvious example of that.

If we are talking about other stuff that is useful to our lives, then the value is relative to the beholder and their situation. Water is more valuable than gold from a survival point of view, but not from a $ point of view.




You're spot on, and this is a bit of an issue - there are a huge number of cross purposes in economic definitions, and the word "capital" is one of them.

My personal take on the word (informed by the dictionary source I gave above and a rather pragmatic approach to economics) is that "capital is stuff". Typically this "stuff" is in the form of either physical goods (lumber, food, concrete, gold, etc) and services (and I know services can't really be 'physical' but I can have a reasonable claim on the labour of someone through prepayment of salary, or a labour contract, etc); or financial assets (such as bank balances, stocks, bonds, etc).

Ultimately though, the "financial capital" is just a slightly divorced claim on the physical capital, and all anyone really cares about is the real stuff which they can eat or build with or develop, etc. You might have a big bank balance, but all you really care about is what you can ultimately cash it in for.




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