Bubbles

Many of us are overwhelmed by reality and retreat to "bubbles".  Charles Murray deserves great credit for popularizing the idea. Most of the people I know who took his "bubble test" did not fare so well. My own favorite bubble is the optimist bubble.

There is so much not to be optimistic about but my comfort zone (an admitted weakness) is the one that sees the glass as half-full.  But there is a case for the optimist view.  I recently read the manuscript of Ake and David Andersson's forthcoming Time, Space and Capital. They reiterate the story of humankind's amazing material progress over the last several hundred years (as do do Deirdre McCloskey and many others) and they make the case that the economic theory we have helps us to understand it.

To their great credit, the Anderssons go further and break new ground on how capital theory can be broadened so that we can gain an even better grasp. They elaborate concepts of capital. “Land may consist of scarce natural resources such as gold or oil, and then it takes on all the characteristics of physical capital. Access to natural resources – including land formations that are valuable because of their beauty – is yet another physical capital attribute. But land is also valuable for the access is provides to other people, in which case land should be conceptualized as a bundle of social capital attributes. Thus, the traditional definition of capital corresponds to a bundle of physical capital attributes, ‘land’ is a bundle of physical and social capital attributes, and labor similarly consists of a bundle of human and social capital attributes.” (p. xx).

Simply referring to “capital” is vague. The same applies to “land”. It’s really all about key attributes. A street address, for example, denotes a substantial set of productive attributes because it says a lot about the plausibility of operating in a variety of networks. Of course. This is how we can better understand cities.

Back to bubbles. Innovation and technology are a great boon to people in some very poor places. Today's WSJ includes "Mobile Banking Gives a Big Boost to Kenya's Poor: Benefits to to women particularly ..." It's not just Bitcoin for billionaires evading capital controls (bless them for that). It's not about Europe's Great Enrichment. It's not about the UN or the IMF or foreign aid. It's better.