Capital Stocks

I. The summary table

The list below is the operational version of Full Accounting's gesture toward "a dozen capital stocks." Each row is treated in full in §II. The point of the table is to be the single page someone can put in front of a policy analyst, an editor, or a finance minister and say: this is the balance sheet you are actually running, not the one your spreadsheet is showing you.

Twelve rows. The exact partition is a taxonomy choice — "roughly a dozen" is the right level of precision: some accountings fold trust into social capital, split human capital into health and skill, or treat regional viability as a separate stock. Cultural capital (language, canon, taste, ritual, artistic lineages, cultural memory) and regional/spatial capital (critical mass of population, services, firms, and infrastructure in a territory) are not denied; in this version they are treated as distributions and combinations of the twelve rows, with cultural capital as a future-split candidate as the corpus's Sterile Generativity material develops. The important claim is not the count. It is that each row names a real load-bearing stock whose depletion is historically associated with recognisable failure modes.

II. Per-stock reference

Each section below uses the same four labels — what it is, built by, depleted by, false-zero failure — plus a brief note on recovery horizon and cross-stock interactions where relevant. The treatment is short by design. Where a deeper essay exists in the corpus, it is linked.

1. Financial capital

What it is. Money, credit, sovereign borrowing capacity, fiscal headroom, central-bank balance sheet, household savings.

Built by. Production exceeding consumption, productive investment, prudent fiscal management, credible monetary institutions, healthy underlying capital stocks (depleted human or institutional capital eventually shows up as fiscal stress).

Depleted by. Persistent deficits that fund consumption rather than productive investment, currency collapse, financial crisis, monetisation that destroys credibility.

Recovery horizon. Years (mild adjustment) to a decade (post-crisis rebuild). Genuine sovereign default events can compress recovery into a few years but at high cost to other stocks.

False-zero failure. This is the inverse case. Financial capital has the only mature ledger. The standard failure is not that financial capital is invisible; it is that everything else is, which makes financial figures look healthy while other stocks deplete. "GDP up while life expectancy, fertility, trust, or institutional competence falls" is the signature.

2. Physical infrastructure capital

What it is. Roads, bridges, ports, grids, pipes, rail, buildings, factories, communications networks, military hardware, public-health infrastructure.

Built by. Construction investment, maintenance budgets, replacement schedules.

Depleted by. Deferred maintenance, deferred replacement, disinvestment in capacity, destruction (war, disaster), obsolescence without replacement.

Recovery horizon. Decades to build major systems. Maintenance is continuous and cumulative — a single skipped year may be invisible; a generation of skipped years produces simultaneous failure across the entire stock.

False-zero failure. Maintenance debt rarely appears on the public balance sheet. A bridge that needs $50M in maintenance over five years and gets $0 has booked savings of $50M; the offsetting depreciation is invisible. The American Society of Civil Engineers' infrastructure report cards have been issuing the same warning for decades because the alternative ledger doesn't exist.

3. Productive / industrial capital

What it is. The capacity to turn inputs into real goods and services: firms as going concerns, supplier networks, manufacturing base, engineering cultures, logistics competence, energy-intensive production capacity, and the tacit operating knowledge that makes production reliable.

Built by. Productive investment, retained earnings reinvested into capacity, engineering authority, supplier relationships, apprenticeship inside firms, stable demand that justifies capacity formation, institutions that reward long-term productive competence over short-term extraction.

Depleted by. Financialisation, offshoring without replacement, private-equity extraction, under-maintenance of production systems, supplier squeeze, loss of engineering authority, energy-price shocks, treating firms as cash-flow objects rather than productive organisms.

Recovery horizon. Decades. Physical plant can be rebuilt faster than supplier networks, engineering culture, and tacit production competence. Once a production ecosystem breaks, reindustrialisation is not a procurement decision; it is a generation-chain problem.

False-zero failure. Shareholder returns, GDP, and quarterly profitability can rise while productive capacity is being mined. The firm remains profitable on paper while the generator that made future production possible is consumed. This is the economic form of Sterile Generativity.

4. Demographic capital

What it is. Population age structure, fertility rate, dependency ratio, working-age share, replacement-rate margin.

Built by. Fertility at or above replacement, immigration with successful integration, healthy reproductive architecture across the seven inputs in Fertility Requires Margin.

Depleted by. Sustained below-replacement fertility, emigration of the productive cohort, war, plague, gendered-migration imbalance, collapse of pair-formation architecture.

Recovery horizon. Twenty to thirty years per cohort under the best case. Population pyramids become structurally locked once the working-age base is too small to sustain the reproductive cohort — at which point the depletion becomes operationally irreversible on institutional time horizons, even though biology has not changed.

False-zero failure. Pension systems, healthcare systems, and care-economy projections treat the next generation as a given. The demographic depletion appears as "actuarial uncertainty" rather than as a depleted capital stock. Below-replacement fertility persisting for four decades is not unexpected; it is unaccounted for.

5. Human capital

What it is. Skills, education, health, cognitive readiness, working capacity, tacit professional knowledge held by the working population.

Built by. Schooling, apprenticeship, on-the-job training, healthcare and nutrition, family transmission of competence, generation chains in skilled professions.

Depleted by. Educational collapse, brain drain, mass long-term unemployment, public-health collapse, generation breakage in skilled trades (links to Sterile Generativity), credential systems that issue tokens uncoupled from competence.

Recovery horizon. One cohort (~20 years) for new entrants. Rebuilding a broken generation chain — a profession whose senior practitioners retire without apprentices — takes longer than rebuilding the institutional shell around it; some chains do not recover at all on policy-relevant timescales.

False-zero failure. Degrees, certificates, and headcount get booked as human capital. The underlying competence does not. PISA can fall for a decade while the education ministry reports steady or rising output. Healthcare workforce statistics can climb while the median nurse loses ten years of seniority.

6. Cognitive capital

What it is. The collective sense-making capacity of a population — the ability of a society to model reality well enough to make decisions that survive contact with it. Distinct from human capital: a population of individually clever people can collectively lose the ability to share a frame, evaluate evidence, or update beliefs against feedback.

Built by. Functional epistemic institutions (universities, courts, press, statistical agencies); shared information ecosystem; discipline of public reasoning; widely-held literacy in evidence and probability; institutions that own the channel through which reality enters as correction (see Non-Compilation).

Depleted by. Attention-economy capture, epistemic tribalisation, capture of evaluating institutions by what they were meant to evaluate, propaganda saturation, AI-generated information flood that breaks the cost-to-counterfeit asymmetry that authentication used to depend on.

Recovery horizon. Unknown. Severe cognitive-capital degradation appears to require exogenous shock, institutional replacement, or generational turnover to reverse; routine policy correction is rarely enough. The recovery time may be effectively a generation, may be longer, may not be available at modern scale.

False-zero failure. "Engagement," "reach," and "information abundance" all read as health on the dominant metrics. Collapse of shared epistemic substrate is invisible to those metrics by construction.

7. Social capital

What it is. Networks of reciprocity, density of intermediary institutions (clubs, congregations, unions, mutual-aid associations, scenes), bridging and bonding ties, civic membership.

Built by. Repeated cooperation in bounded contexts, intermediary institutions with stable membership, intergenerational continuity, residential stability, contexts that produce shared experience across class and faction.

Depleted by. Atomisation, mass mobility, intermediary collapse, single-generation residence patterns, contexts that route social experience through screens rather than co-presence.

Recovery horizon. Generation+. Some forms of intermediary density — congregational life, traditional civic associations, multi-generation neighborhood scenes — may not recover in their old form once the underlying conditions change.

False-zero failure. Generally not measured at the policy level. Where it is measured, the metric (membership counts, survey trust scores) is usually a lagging proxy for what is structurally happening; by the time the curve bends, the underlying capital has already eroded for a decade.

8. Trust capital

What it is. Generalised confidence in institutions, contracts, strangers, and the predictability of the rules. A subset of social capital, but elastic to policy action in ways that warrant separate treatment.

Built by. Repeated honest fulfilment of obligations, transparency, low corruption, predictable rules applied without favour, visible accountability for visible failures.

Depleted by. Visible corruption, broken promises, accountability failures (especially elite failures going unpunished), capture of regulators by the regulated, opacity in decisions whose consequences are visible.

Recovery horizon. Decades to generations. Trust is easier to break than to build; a single visible elite betrayal can erase a decade of accumulated institutional credibility, and rebuilding requires a generation of subsequent boring consistency.

False-zero failure. Compliance surveys produce numbers that look stable through cycles in which the underlying texture of trust is changing. Institutions optimise the survey-facing layer; the trust-substrate erodes invisibly until a precipitating event makes the gap visible.

9. Moral capital

What it is. Shared normative commitments — what the population considers wrong even when doing it is cheap and legal. The floor of behaviour that does not need to be policed because it is not seriously contemplated.

Built by. Religious tradition, narrative culture, family and community transmission, moral education, common reference texts and stories, ritual reinforcement, modelling by elite behaviour.

Depleted by. Pluralism without bridging norms or a shared procedural floor, elite behaviour visibly diverging from claimed norms, framing capture by interested actors, atomisation that removes the social cost of norm violation.

Recovery horizon. Generational. Some layers — religious moral substrates, organic community norms — may not be rebuildable in their old form once the underlying transmission infrastructure is gone.

False-zero failure. Almost never measured. Erosion is legible only after it produces visible behavioural change in tail cases (white-collar crime tolerance, dishonesty in elite hiring, normalisation of behaviour that earlier generations would have considered disqualifying), at which point the depletion is several decades in arrears.

10. Institutional capital

What it is. Functioning legal architecture, administrative competence, rule of law, state capacity, the implicit operating knowledge held by a stable senior bureaucracy.

Built by. Generation chains in the civil service, training and apprenticeship inside agencies, depoliticised hiring and promotion, institutional memory protected from churn, sufficient resource floor that capacity is not eroded by under-funding.

Depleted by. Politicisation of hiring, austerity that targets operating capacity, turnover that breaks generation chains, outsourcing that hollows out the agency's own competence, ideological purges, simple long-term neglect.

Recovery horizon. Decades. Once a generation chain breaks — once the senior cohort retires without apprentices in place — the institution's competence cannot be re-acquired faster than another generation can be trained, and only if the training architecture itself survives.

False-zero failure. Government activity (reports filed, processes followed, strategies developed) is measured. What would actually break if the agency were removed is not. Institutions can appear functional for years after operating competence has been hollowed out, because the institutional shell continues to perform legibility-facing motions.

11. Environmental capital

What it is. Atmosphere, aquifers, soil fertility, biodiversity, fisheries, forests, watersheds, ecosystem services, climate stability.

Built by. Natural regeneration on natural timescales; active restoration where regenerative capacity exists; protection of conditions under which the underlying systems renew themselves.

Depleted by. Extraction faster than regeneration, pollution that exceeds absorptive capacity, soil exhaustion, biodiversity collapse, climate-system shifts that move ecosystems out of their viability range.

Recovery horizon. Decades for restorable layers (some fisheries, some forests). Centuries for soil. Millennia for climate-state shifts. Some thresholds — major species loss, irreversible ecosystem-state changes — are not recoverable on human-civilisational timescales.

False-zero failure. Treated as free input. Partial pricing exists for carbon in some jurisdictions; for water in fewer; for soil, biodiversity, and pollination rarely in binding fiscal ledgers. Environmental economics has produced ecosystem-services prices; the problem is that those prices mostly do not bind public budgets. The accounting fiction sustains GDP figures that are partially composed of unbooked drawdowns on the environmental stock.

12. Optionality capital

What it is. The stock of reversible choices not yet taken; the cheap-to-exit positions a society still holds; latent strategic flexibility. The value of being able to choose differently later if the current path turns out wrong.

Built by. Avoiding lock-in commitments, maintaining redundant capacity, keeping reversible structures, refusing irreversible bets where the bet's payoff is uncertain and the cost of being wrong is large.

Depleted by. Path-dependent infrastructure choices, treaty lock-in, demographic momentum that closes future demographic options, technological commitments that determine adjacent decisions for decades, institutional decisions that destroy alternative institutional forms.

Recovery horizon. Often irreversible once consumed. The whole structural point of optionality is that it cannot be cheaply rebuilt — a society that has demolished its small-scale agriculture cannot reconstitute it in a single generation; a profession whose generation chain has been severed cannot be re-instantiated by hiring; a treaty regime that has been entered cannot always be exited without compounding cost.

False-zero failure. Never priced. "We have always done it this way" is the conversational signature of exhausted optionality, but the exhaustion does not appear as a cost on any balance sheet. The cost shows up only when the path needs to be changed and turns out to be unchangeable.

III. The interaction structure

The stocks are not independent. Three structural facts about their interaction are worth flagging because they show up in almost every concrete case.

Cascades. Depletion in one stock propagates. Demographic collapse erodes the working-age base, which erodes fiscal capacity, which erodes the ability to fund the institutional capital that maintains the rule of law, which erodes the trust capital that holds the social-economic order together. The cascade direction is empirically asymmetric — depletion runs downstream faster than rebuilding runs upstream — which is why "we will repair X later when we can afford to" almost never works as planned.

Limited substitution. The stocks substitute for one another only at the margins. Fiscal capital can compensate for a small drop in human capital (hire foreign experts, fund retraining). It cannot substitute for the absence of demographic capital, because the demographic stock determines the size of the working-age base that funds everything else. Social capital can substitute for some institutional capital (community enforcement of norms where police are absent), but only inside a narrow band. Outside that band, the stocks are complementary rather than substitutable — a society missing a critical stock cannot patch the gap by oversupplying the others. This is the practical content of Liebig's Law applied to civilisational accounting: the binding stock is the one nearest exhaustion.

Asymmetric measurement. The stocks differ wildly in how legibly their depletion shows up on existing accounting systems. Fiscal capital is on the ledger in real time. Physical capital appears as maintenance debt and depreciation, partially. Everything else shows up only when it has already failed — as demographic crisis, as institutional collapse, as trust breakdown, as cognitive dysfunction in the public sphere. This is the structural reason policy systematically over-invests in the visible stocks and under-invests in the load-bearing ones (see Full Accounting's treatment of why this is mechanism, not malice).

IV. Using the reference

The page is built to be a working object, not an essay to be read once. The two intended uses:

Policy diagnostic. For any proposed policy, walk the twelve rows. Which stocks does this policy touch? Which stocks does it deplete in order to fund the legible benefit? What is the recovery horizon of the depleted stock, and is the policy's beneficiary the same population that bears the depletion cost? A policy whose visible benefit appears on the financial-capital ledger and whose hidden cost appears across demographic, institutional, and social capital is not a gain. It is balance-sheet theft at the civilisational scale — flow improvement funded by liquidating an unbooked stock.

Debate clarification. When a public debate is stuck — a flame war that has lasted a decade and is no closer to resolution — try labelling the participants by which capital stock they are implicitly maximising. Many apparently irreconcilable policy disagreements turn out to be disagreements about which stock to draw down to fund which other stock, conducted in a vocabulary that hides the trade because no shared balance sheet exists. A reference like this one does not resolve those disagreements. It does make them visible enough to argue.

The harder use — and the eventual purpose of Full Accounting and the Fourth Branch — is to install an institution whose statutory job is to maintain the consolidated ledger across all twelve stocks and to publish its findings with enough authority that ignoring them is procedurally expensive. Until that institution exists, the reference page is the substitute: a single artifact that puts the missing ledger in front of the reader and refuses to let the conversation pretend the other stocks are booked at zero because they are unmeasurable.

Related:

• Full Accounting — Why "hard to measure" is not the same as zero, and the conceptual frame this reference operationalises
• The Fourth Branch — The institutional architecture for an entity that actually maintains the ledger
• Telocracy — The explicit objective function that makes "full" accounting derivable rather than arbitrary
• Flourishing Is Maximum Safety Margin — Liebig's Law applied to the consolidated balance sheet
• Sterile Generativity — Why generator-chain depletion is the depletion mode most likely to be invisible until it is irrecoverable
• Fertility Requires Margin — Demographic capital treated as a multi-input production function
• Non-Compilation — Why this reference, like other public-usable decision frames, is rarely produced as a recognised genre