Today’s topic is the intangible economy, what it means for competition, policy, inequality, and so much more. For fifty years, the percentage of investment in corporate America and elsewhere allocated to intangible assets has risen slowly but steadily as a percentage of the total. An increasingly intangible rich economy has a meaningful impact on the way companies are valued, how startups are financed, how economic data is measured and reported, and the effectiveness of policy makers’ tools to manage the economy. A paper from McKinsey states that over the past 25 years the share of total investment in intangibles increased by 29 percent in the United States and ten European countries. Rising investment in intangibles has been linked with increasing total factor productivity of entire economies. This could indicate that the deceleration of productivity growth over the past decade partly reflects a slowdown in investment in intangible assets. That is one of the many contentions of co-authors Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake in their fascinating new book Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy. I caught up with Professor Haskel for the New Books Network, and here is a portion of that discussion. 

New Books Network

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