Part II

Capital is not a timeless inventory. What counts as a productive asset, where it accumulates, and who can command it change with the regime around it. Braudel's three floors of economic life help locate those changes without pretending that they occur by a single law: material routines below, visible exchange above them, and a commanding zone in which reach and privilege can bend ordinary market relations.

Carlota Perez asks how a cheapening input can reorganize technologies, firms, finance, and ordinary expectation together. Computation is a plausible candidate for such a role, but only after its different states are separated. A service consumed now is not the same economic object as a trained capability that can be copied, adapted, or called again. Search is not memory. Inference is not training. Electricity enters each, but it does different work.

The next movement therefore begins before any declaration of a new factor. It asks how work changes state, which expenditures vanish with execution, which leave reusable structure behind, and which constraints move rather than disappear when cognition becomes computational.