Capital in the Twenty-First Century

by Thomas Piketty

An even greater difficulty is that it is very hard to gauge the value of “virgin” land (as humans found it centuries or millennia ago) apart from improvements due to human intervention, such as drainage, irrigation, fertilization, and so on. The same problem arises in connection with natural resources such as petroleum, gas, rare earth elements, and the like, whose pure value is hard to distinguish from the value added by the investments needed to discover new deposits and prepare them for exploitation. I therefore include all these forms of wealth in capital. Of course, this choice does not eliminate the need to look closely at the origins of wealth, especially the boundary line between accumulation and appropriation.