I wrote this to capture and comment on two significant tweet streams that offered a bootstrapper's definition of capital. Here are relevant sections from both:<p>"We view economic capital: it is the capability of a group of people (an organization) to meet its own diverse economic needs. Everything about the organization, its skills and capabilities, its cultural roots, its relationships to its customers, its resilience--all of them play a part in defining capital. Capital defined this way is an intrinsic attribute of an organization, and it is not measurable. What we tend to do is reduce capital to its monetary valuation, and that process itself does injury, because the monetary then gets confused with capital itself."<p>"My definition: Capital is the capability of a population to meet its own diverse economic needs. Capital in that sense includes cultural, social practices that enable cooperation in a people and also includes skills, know-how and formal knowledge. Capital in my sense exists prior to market or the notion of trade itself. Without this capital, there is no trade. When we have capital in that sense, we are able to meet our own diverse material needs. Trade arises when we exchange our surplus for some other groups' surplus. Markets organize trade."