Talk:Capital (economics)

From Academic Kids

NPOV dispute courtesy of user:The Anome from wikipedia:pages needing attention. I'm not an economist, so I make no judgement... :-/ Martin

So far as I can tell, the following is not a grammatical sentence: "The Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk maintained that capital intensity within a certain industry as determined by consumer demand rather than the supply of saving, through the roundaboutness of production processes." Perhaps the "as" (after "industry") should be "was".

References, please!

I'm concerned about a lot of the material in this article and related articles, in particular the analysis of the six "styles of capital". Every reference I can find to this analysis is sourced back to the same person, Craig Hubley. He is not an economics professional, but rather someone who likes to post his ideas up on the internet. Unless the information can be backed up by a source other than Craig Hubley, it needs to go; an encyclopedia is not the place for articles that describe the ideas of one individual, where that individual is not well known.

Enchanter 10:34, May 28, 2004 (UTC)

Sorry but that is really serious witch hunting. A lot of the assertions in this article are just regular stuff, and several names are mentionned as reference. If you object to one specific point, please do so, but just deleting the article because of its author is not reasonable. SweetLittleFluffyThing

Yes, there is plenty of stuff in there which is regular stuff, and I'm not suggesting for a moment that the whole article is deleted. But some of the material here is very dubious. I can find no analysis referring to "styles of capital" in any economics reference, or anywhere on the internet (other than by or sourced to Mr Hubley), at all. The same goes for instructional capital (which I've already reduced to a stub after trying and failing to come up with anyone, anywhere, who used the term instructional capital in the same way as the article.) If you disagree with me, and think that that part of the analysis is "regular stuff", I would be interested to see references, which is why I have asked on the talk page before removing any content.

This is not witch hunt; I don't care who wrote the article. What I care about is that the article should be a high quality summary of knowledge on the subject, rather than reflecting some new research by one individual. Enchanter 20:47, 29 May 2004 (UTC)

Enchanter, I agree with you that this is a contraversial issue. When I studied economics these terms were not used as described here. However there is a legitimate literature that has developed in the last decade. For example, look at Thomas A Stewart, 1997, Intellectuall capital: The new wealth of organizations, Doubleday, NewYork. Stewart divides intellectual capital into Human capital, Customer capital, and Structural capital. The term Digital capital comes from Don Tapscott, David Ticoll,and Alex Lowery, 2000, Digital Capital: Harnessing the power of business webs, Nicholas Brealey Publishing, London. Knowledge capital is from Alan Burton-Jones, 1999, Knowledge capitalism, Oxford University press, Oxford. Charles Leadbeater, 1999, Living on thin Air, Penguin, London, uses the distiction between knowledge capital, social capital, and financial capital.

The proliferation of capitals is quite recent and still very much in flux. But I do not think that this warrants there exclusion on the grounds of original research. One of the advantages of an online 'opedia is that we can deal with the state of human knowledge as it evolves.

Just one suggestion, this part of the article should be moved to Capital (business) because these new capitals originate in the management literature (both popular and academic) rather than from economics. mydogategodshat 18:39, 2 Jun 2004 (UTC)