BridgeConsoleMasher wrote: ↑Thu Jan 13, 2022 6:51 pm
I don't think the distinction of capital and liquidity is the issue.
Liquidity is just money (or ultimately fungible assets), but very specifically money, and not really termed for social concentration of wealth but the singular product manufactured by society designed specifically to change hands (and deteriorate in value as a natural course of population growth).
Liquidity, is not money. Liquidity deals with how easy it is to
sell goods or services within a particular market. The Mortgage Crisis of 2008 was caused when the housing market suddenly lost most of its liquidity. The crisis wasn't that people couldn't buy a house, but because the banks couldn't sell a house. The banks were stuck with a bunch of physical assets (in this case houses) they could not convert into liquid capital (i.e. money) so a lot of their available capital just vanished.
Capital is a slightly more parent term and denotes the more mathematical type framing of an economic/commercial valued substance. Capital reference includes money and fungible assets at its most base but also what that money turns into as a manifestation of one's operation with more specific terms of structure and human variables.
I'm not an economics major, but in economics capital is all the stuff that you need to provide goods or services, but otherwise has no value in and off itself. Like a 3D printer, it can be valuable, but only because it can produce things for you, otherwise it's just a fancy looking box.
Wealth, as the main issue of conflict, is an issue from the outset. Feudal monarchies had wealth in the hands of more permanent caste structures of people that would pretty much just hold land in their families until the end of time, under rule of shifting rulers and an ever stagnant population of mass servants.
A caste structure that was established to overcome the low liquidity in their economy. How do run a government, of any kind, in a situation where even the top 1% might now have any cash money and the 99% produce just enough goods and services to keep themselves and their families from starving? Labor was what most kingdoms relied on because it was the only thing readily available. Remember that this applied to the lords as well as the peasants, in fact one could argue the only difference was a serf was expected to grow food for the king while a knight was expected to slaughter the king's enemies but both are a form of labor collected by the monarch.
The key polarity here, is that while Britain focused a lot more on microdevelopment of its economic infrastructure, Germany had a much more stronger sense of unification and followed an intellectual pursuit and became the heaviest market in Europe.
The point I was trying to make is that it was easier for the British because most of their population was concentrated into a fairly small area. Russia had more people but they were spread out over an area that dwarfed England and most European countries. The first commercial railroad in England connected what are now suburbs of the greater London area and was about 14 kilometers in length. The first Russian railroad linked St. Petersburg and the Czar's palace almost 20 kilometers away, and that was considered an 'experimental line.' It shows the difficulties the Russian's faced when trying to industrialize because their population was so spread out that just trying to get goods to a ready market was an investment of itself.
