Economics > General Economics
arXiv:2606.18288 (econ)
[Submitted on 12 Jun 2026]
Abstract:This volume develops a knowledge theory of capital for economies in which productive capacity increasingly resides in software, data, models, routines, expertise, platforms, organizations, commons, and public epistemic infrastructure. Beginning from Adam Smith's theory of labour, stock, specialization, and market extent, it asks what changes when knowledge becomes stock-like, mobile across forms, scalable, governable, recombinable, and imperfectly visible in accounting. The book introduces knowledge-bearing stock as the central object and analyses how it is generated, converted into governable form, deployed, improved through feedback, enclosed or shared, measured, impaired, and used as input to future production. It distinguishes embodied, disembodied, institutionalized, commons, and public knowledge forms and develops concepts such as first conversion, cognitive enclosure, feedback capture, dark capital, and expected knowledge loss. The argument is conditional and testable: modern wealth depends not only on capital accumulation, but on how productive knowledge is governed.
| Comments: | 458 pages, 8 figures. Theory-building monograph developing a conditional framework for knowledge-bearing capitalism, with formal concepts, mechanisms, measurement apparatus, and falsification conditions |
| Subjects: | General Economics (econ.GN); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Theoretical Economics (econ.TH) |
| MSC classes: | 2020: Primary 91B08, Secondary 91B32, 91B38, 91A80, 90B50, 94A15 |
| ACM classes: | J.4; H.4; I.2 |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2606.18288 [econ.GN] |
| (or arXiv:2606.18288v1 [econ.GN] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.18288 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) |
Submission history
From: Jeffrey Gardiner [view email]
[v1]
Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:25:41 UTC (1,307 KB)
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