For Adam Smith capital is ‘as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion’. If you can store the labour of others for future use, then you can spare yourself the time and the energy of working for your own immediate needs, which means you can invest in something new that will bring even greater reward. Once capital had arrived on the scene, innovation could accelerate, because time and property could be invested in projects that initially generated no benefit. Few hunter-gatherers, for example, could ever afford the time
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