Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy

Stian Westlake is a senior fellow at Nesta, the UK’s national foundation for innovation. . Jonathan Haskel is professor of economics at Imperial College London

The transformation of the intangible economy has rarely been pointed out, and its implications are not much understood or discussed. There are no other books similar to this one."--Diane Coyle, author of GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History"With an impressive breadth of topics, this thorough book takes a compelling look at the importance of intangible capital. From the Back Cover"The nineteenth- and twentieth-century world where capitalists owned factories and workers supplied labor has ended. In this book, Haskel and Westlake explain with fascinating examples how business assets today are mostly intangible and how this changes everything we know about businesscorporate strategy,

Capitalism without Capital shows that the growing importance of intangible assets has also played a role in some of the big economic changes of the last decade. The rise of intangible investment is, Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake argue, an underappreciated cause of phenomena from economic inequality to stagnating productivity.Haskel and Westlake bring together a decade of research on how to measure intangible investment and its impact on national accounts, showing the amount different countries invest in intangibles, how this has changed over time, and the latest thinking on how to assess this.