World After Capital is a book by Albert Wenger, a Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures. It is a detailed study of how we need to be thinking about society’s biggest challenges in a world shifting into a knowledge economy - one in which attention is the primary commodity.

World After Capital has two goals. The first goal is to establish that we are, in fact, experiencing a third such non-linearity. The key argument is that each prior time the space of the possible expanded dramatically, the binding scarcity constraint for humanity shifted. Specifically, the invention of agriculture shifted scarcity from food to land. Industrialization, in turn, shifted scarcity from land to capital. Now digital technologies are shifting scarcity from capital to attention. Scarcity, here, refers to humanity’s ability to meet everyone’s basic needs.

It I’ve been lucky to work with Albert and this book is an amazing compilation of his thinking across a number of topics.