The emergence of capital has at least three notable effects. Firstly, the more capital we succeed in creating — the process is risky, remember, and we can’t guarantee we will create any — the more specialized we are likely to individually become, meaning the less our understanding of supply and demand helpfully extends beyond our own circumstances

Following Hernando de Soto, we see capital as “economic potential energy”; a stock of crystallized and stored time; the memory of experimentation and discovery; a tool allowing us to not need to work completely from scratch, and shared in a common language to spare us equally from isolation.