v79 · A Michigan nonprofit research institute, in formation · Founded 2026
Capital is crystallized labor.
Labor is capital in formation.
Human capability is an appreciating asset.
The Capability Capital Institute exists to prove it.
We are not theorists of the shop floor. Seven of us started on it — three hundred years across manufacturing, engineering and enterprise technology — and the eighth has spent thirty-five years in the accounting that decides what counts. One argument.
Wally was the worst team leader in my Trim Shop. Arguing with supervision. Cussing. Stopping the line. Management asked me more than once why we kept him.
But lazy men coast, and Wally was loud. He was fighting upstream problems nobody had ever asked him about — supplier tape that cut his team's hands, paint overspray filling the locator holes his clips had to snap into, grommets spec'd so tight they were giving his people wrist injuries. He could tell you which booth was filling which holes. He had the entire diagnosis.
What he had never had was a reason to believe that saying so would change anything.
Six months after someone finally asked, his area had the lowest downtime in the shop. Same man. Same paycheck. Same contract.
General Motors has no record that any of this happened.
Lansing Grand River · 2001
The intelligence is already there, already paid for, and almost none of it is written down. That is the whole of our work.
Frontline workers are named by pseudonym; identifying details are changed. The events are as they happened.
First Principles
Three convictions beneath everything
What we do
Where the argument meets the floor.
An argument that stays in a book changes nothing. One instrument to establish what is true, one to write it down, one to put it on the floor. Each is judged by whether practice changes.
01In evidence
Research
≈360M people, across six sectors and two democracies.