Albert Wenger

We're seeing a huge amount of that kind of digital innovation as a result.

Yeah, I think that this fundamental setup is right.

The point in my book is sort of a complementary but different point, which is that I think at an even larger scale, zooming out, capital itself even is not the thing that's holding us back, right?

And

I want to be clear about two things.

One is there's huge distributional issues in the world.

So we can come back to those.

I mean, so, you know, the access to capital is wildly, you know, has been really pulled apart.

And certainly the access to financial capital is we have huge wealth and income inequality in the world.

But what I mean is physical capital is not the thing that's holding us back as humanity.

So the best way to think about this is to look at China.

China literally has stamped entire cities on the ground in the space of like, you know, a couple of years.

And during the Corona crisis, they built a whole bunch of hospitals like in the space of a week.

I mean, it's like, we're going to build a hospital here and boom, there's a hospital there, right?

And so you kind of see that physical capital as in

um you know the construction of machines and of buildings and of roads it's not the thing that's holding us back mind you we have terrible infrastructure problems in the us but it's not because there is a lack of machinery somehow it's because there's a lack of political will to invest in infrastructure um and i'm also drawing a very clear distinction in the book between um three stages which are um

which are scarce, sufficient, and abundant.

So by no means I'm making a claim that physical capital is abundant in the world.

It is not.

It's costly to make machines, and it's costly to deploy them.