Laziness - a driver for and a brake on - human progress

People use the word 'capital' to mean lots of quite different things, especially in economics.

In its purest sense, I like to define capital as 'labour saving devices'. From stone tools and animal pelts for clothing (or whatever the earliest true labor saving devices were), up to sat nav's superseding maps, which superseded using your own experience and memories (or whatever they invented last week).

The whole idea is that people spend some time inventing or discovering or developing something which enables them to achieve the same results for less effort (or better results ...