CONCEPT
Intangible Capital
The category of economic assets — software, design, organizational knowledge, brand equity, human skill — whose rising share of advanced-economy investment the national accounts systematically fail to capture, and whose measurement becomes essential in the AI economy.
Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake's Capitalism Without Capital documented the rising share of intangible investment in advanced economies and the systematic failure of national accounts to measure it adequately. Intangible assets are difficult to measure because they are non-rival (my use does not diminish yours), because they generate spillovers (their benefits extend beyond the firm that created them), and because their value is context-dependent (a patent is worth millions in one market and nothing in another). These characteristics make market valuation unreliable and accounting valuation essentially arbitrary. The AI transition intensifies every dimension of the intangible measurement problem.
In The You On AI Field Guide
When Segal argues that value has migrated from code to judgment — from the tangible artifact of software to the intangible capacity to decide what software should exist — he is describing, in a builder's language, the shift from tangible to intangible capital that Coyle, Haskel, and Westlake have been documenting for