Paul Diggle 
Hello and welcome to Macro Bytes, the economics and Politics podcast from abrdn. My name is Paul Diggle, chief economist at abrdn. And today we are talking about the intangible economy, what it is, how intangibles have shaped the nature and some of the malaises of the modern economy and how policymakers can take into account this shift to an intangible economy in order to boost growth and improve living standards. So, I'm joined by Sri Kochugovindan, senior economist at abrdn.

Sree Kochugovindan   2:36
Hi, Paul.

Paul Diggle   2:38
And Professor Jonathan Haskel, economics professor at Imperial College, London and external member of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, a former non-executive director at the UK Statistics Authority and author of ‘Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy’ and before that ‘Capitalism without Capital: the Rise of the Intangible Economy’ both authored, co-authored with Stian Westlake. Jonathan, welcome to the podcast.

Jonathan Haskel   3:05
Hello Paul. Hello Sree. Thank you very much for having me on.

Paul Diggle   3:09
So Sree, let me hand over to you to kick the conversation off with Jonathan. But before I do, Jonathan, was your PhD supervisor, right?

Sree Kochugovindan   3:18
That's correct. Many years ago - and we worked on, let me think now it was many years ago, labour demand, estimating labour demand elasticities using natural experiments. And the idea was to trace out demand curve using exogenous shocks to the supply curve. So that was, a very detailed, very interesting piece of work we did together many years ago.

Paul Diggle   3:41
Well, we'll have to do a follow up podcast at some point.

Sree Kochugovindan   3:46
Well, so, Jonathan, thank you very much for joining us. And if we could just start maybe with some scene setting. So in your first book Capitalism without Capital, you outline the nature, the changing nature of the economy and how investment has shifted from a mostly tangible economy to an intangible economy. And then in the second book you developed these ideas further when you talk about how the current situation or the great economic disappointments - things like secular stagnation, inequity, and how the rise of the intangible economy can actually be one of the new theories to help explain where we are at the moment. So could you perhaps start by explaining what you mean by intangible versus tangible investments and the scale to which these have changed over time?

Jonathan Haskel   4:39
Thanks very much Sree and thank thanks for the question. It's a pleasure to be on and to talk to abrdn. I know I've talked to a number of your staff in the past about all these intangible investments, so it's a real pleasure to be talking to you again and it's nice to have a bit of a break from monetary policy which Paul, as you kindly referred to, is now my day job. So, I'm gonna use this occasion, if it's all right with you, just to talk about the book. I don't have anything to say about monetary policy but happy to do that another time. So Sree thanks for the question. Look, why don't we start off with a concrete example? I think that’ll probably help people who are listening. But when we wrote our first book, that was well before the pandemic. When we wrote the second book, it was in the middle of the pandemic. So why don't we use the vaccine as an example? I think when we were thinking and indeed trying to figure out how to react to the pandemic, not only I don't mean that as policymakers or as people you know interested in looking after people's money, but just as citizens. We had in mind something very intangible which was we were relying on the scientists to invent some incredible new constellation of molecules that would vaccinate us against COVID. And so that's just sort of in some ways, a rather conventional intangible investment, namely someone with a white coat and a test tube is doing a load of R&D. They're gonna come up with some formula and that is gonna basically save the world. I don't think we can, you know, there's no exaggeration about all of that. That's something very intangible. The formula for the vaccine is not a tangible thing. You can't sort of drop it on your foot and you know about it. It's not something that you can sort of see in any sense. It's an idea. So that's part of it. Now, of course what it required to actually put it into production - it required a lot of tangible stuff to put it in production. So it had to be done in big factories. It had to be shifted all over the world in trucks and buses and trains and all those kinds of things. So it was a mix of those intangible assets like R&D, but also the tangible assets, as I say, like the factory and the vehicles. But I'll add Sree, if I can, one more thing, which is, it turned out, of course, interestingly, that it wasn't just the R&D, it was a load, when I say it, in order to get the vaccine going and in order to get into people's arms, it required a lot of other types of investments that firms had to make as well. So for example, one thing that we learned is the manufacturing process around the vaccine turned out to be pretty complicated. I'm sure that the listeners would remember, the initial supply of the vaccine, remember, there was all this terrible argument between the European Commission, who thought they'd procured, you know, millions and millions of vaccines from the company, turned out they couldn't produce it. It wasn't that there was something tangible that they were short of. It wasn't that they were short of lorries or they were short of the buildings. It turned out the production process and the knowledge of the production process turned out to be really hard as well. That's something a little bit more than the R&D of just the chemical behind it. It's something about the sort of organisational capital, the organisational structure of firms and companies and all the listeners will be familiar with all of this, if you work for any corporation, something about the DNA of the corporation is an intangible asset, about how it's all organised. So that was one set of issues. The other set of issues, of course, was consumers had to have actually a bit of confidence in the vaccine. So the reputation was another important intangible asset which companies had to build. And again, just extending that slightly.

You know anybody who buys, you know, an expresso coffee or reads a newspaper or whatever it might be. Those reputation assets are really important as well. Anyway, so what we're about is we're about the notion that the economy used to do a lot around those very tangible assets, buildings, vehicles and all of that. But increasingly now it's investment in the intangible assets, the R&D, the reputation, the organisational capital, that's the dominant form of investment in modern day western economies.

 

Sree Kochugovindan  9:26
Oh, I think that's a great example you've given there. It really captures the concept, some of the key features like R&D, reputation, but in your book you have a set of features that are quite exclusive to intangibles and you describe them, summarise them, as the four Ss which I thought was a very good structural framework.

So could you run us through those four Ss?

Jonathan Haskel   9:51
Yeah, let me, if I may Sree, just introduce it in the following way. You know, somebody listened to this might say, oh yeah, just hold on a moment, they might say, the nature of investment in economies is changing all the time. If we were doing this podcast, well, they didn't have podcasts, but you know what I mean. If we were holding this conversation, you know, 140 years ago, everybody would be investing in canals and then we stopped investing in canals because we invested in railways. Then we stopped investing in railways because we invented the motor car and we invested in roads. And then we invented the aeroplane so invested in airports. So surely you might say the nature of investment changes all the time. So why is it that we should worry? And this gets to your four Ss issue, that what we think is there's something very interesting about these types of intangible investment, these knowledge investments, these relationship investments. There’s something very interesting about that because they’ve just basically got fundamentally different economic properties to tangible investments. So let me run through what they are and trying to illustrate with some examples. So the first S is Scale. If I'm running a taxi cab company, let's suppose I'm a mini cab driver. If I want to carry extra passengers in my mini cab company, I need more drivers and I need more mini cabs, right? That's the only way to scale up. So you need more tangible stuff. The mini cab being the car, the vehicle being the tangible asset. On the other hand, if I'm running a mini cab company called Uber, slightly different type of minicab company, I have got a wonderful piece of software, that's an intangible asset, that's a bit of knowledge, just like a formula for R&D. That's lines of code. Analytically, it's the same thing and I can scale that up anyway, so I can order an Uber, you know, in London. I can you go off to Heathrow airport. I can fly to somewhere or other. I can get off the plane there and order another Uber all over again so I can scale up much, much more easily. So that's one S. Equally, once I've had that invention, other people can copy it so other people can copy a bit of computer code. In fact, lots of computer code is designed to be copied. That's called open source software. Once somebody's had a good idea for a banking app, other banks can copy those banking apps as well. So the 2nd S about intangibles is that they spill over, so there's a possibility that one group of people can use another group's assets, and that's not going to be the case in mini cabs, right? If I'm running my minicab company and I've got my cars and my fleet of cars for my minicab company, nobody else can use my mini cabs, but they could essentially use the designs. So again, when we think about these knowledge assets, there were these spillovers. Two more Ss - and the third one is that often it's very difficult to get to recover these investments in intangible assets in a way that you can intangible assets. When Nokia went bankrupt, it turned out they had two assets. They had a building, which they managed to sell off. And they had all their software. They couldn't sell off the software. That was just exclusive to Nokia, and nobody wanted to buy it.

So the S there is sunk, which is at a slightly economic see term. So please forgive me for that. So a sunk investment is investment you can't get back. Final S is when you combine all these assets together, you get a lot of synergies. So if you are thinking about Harry Potter, for example, Harry Potter is an amazing combination of intangible assets. One intangible asset is the book itself. That's just an idea on pieces of paper. The other intangible asset would be the incredible software which goes into the CGI imagery which makes the movie. The other intangible asset would be all the marketing and the merchandising and so forth that convinces everybody to buy it. And I guess a fourth one would be something like let's say the design.

If you go to the theatre, you can see Harry Potter in the theatres. The design of all that and the whole look and the whole feel of it again is something rather intangible. So the synergies between those intangible assets are kind of important. And again we think that's a little bit different to these very tangible assets. It's true that to do the vaccine, you've got a combine the factory and you've got to combine the trucks to ship around all the vaccines, but the sum of it, when it comes to intangibles, is more than the sum of the parts somehow or other. So the joint combination of all Harry Potter intangible assets sums up to much more than if we just summed up each individual one. So those are the different properties of intangible assets and we think that from those properties, lots of interesting economic implications flow.

Paul Diggle   14:58
And Jonathan, one of those economic implications, that you describe in Restarting the Future is how the shift to an intangible economy explains or interacts with some of the ills of the modern economy, things like low productivity, inequality, competition issues and what you call inauthenticity. Why don't we start with the first of them, then, low productivity, and if you can lay out in what ways a more intangible economy relates to productivity growth, and specifically, I wonder if this is all just an issue of mismeasurement. We aren't so good at measuring the intangible economy and the output related to it. Or is there a genuine slowdown in productivity that's occurred as the nature of the economy has changed?

Jonathan Haskel   15:49
Yeah, thanks Paul that’s a very thoughtful question. And I'm afraid the economist’s answer is we're not quite sure, but let's try a stab towards getting the answer. We know that potentially there are big productivity improvements to come from the use of these intangible assets. So we, you know over the last 100 years, let's go back to pharmaceutical example, our lives have been immeasurably improved by the invention of vaccines and new medicines and all those kind of things. So there must be productivity improvements from all of that. So a couple of things follow from that. One is if we've got an economic system which is well suited to encouraging investment in tangible assets but not so well suited to encouraging investment in intangible assets, then we might have a productivity problem if we can't accumulate intangible assets as readily as we can with tangible assets. And what we talk about in the second book is some of the institutional difficulties which are.
that case, you know, which we can talk about in a bit. That's sort of one thought. The second thought, Paul, is your measurement issue. Let's go back to the pharmaceutical example. As I say, it just seems obvious from people's individual experience. You know, just giving medicine to their children, you know, which in the old days, you know, all children would get ill and the old days there were sometimes, terrible fatal consequences. But now we can give wonderful medicines and cure enormous numbers of illnesses. Whether that shows up in GDP or not is another issue. The general health of the population is not something we tend to measure.

In fact, if anything, it's all the other way around, which is we measure operations and we measure all the things that we do as a consequence of people's ill health. So there's a very difficult question as to whether we pick up all that stuff in that form of measurement. As a slightly nuanced version of that, again, let's try another example to try to sort of bring this to life to people, which is driverless cars. If you think about what we need for driverless cars, we need the tangible bit, which is the car, just like the truck and the lorry that we were doing earlier on in the pharmaceutical company. But we need a big piece of intangible investment which is going to be the software which is gonna tell the driverless car what to do so that you and I don't need to steer it. Now we've had immense investment in software, but there aren't really any driverless cars around at the moment. So you might say well it's sort of a measurement come implementation problem, with all the software investment we haven't managed to get the driverless cars on the road yet. And so all this stuff is to come. There is indeed a slow down now, but it's a temporary slowdown and it's to come. That sort of slightly different as you say to the health example where you might say oh we've had lots of investment. Well we were never actually going to measure any of that stuff, as well. So I think what's difficult about all of this is it's a sort of an interaction of all these different things, the intangibles don’t tend to be well measured, it takes a long time to implement all of these things, and often they're orientated to give an outcome which is good for sort of human welfare, but may not necessarily be good for measured GDP.

Paul Diggle   19:11
I know that the measurement of GDP is a big interest of yours as a statistician as well improving that measurement. So following on from the driverless cars thought then and more broadly, artificial intelligence, Chat GPT - obviously extremely topical right now. They are very much intangible assets, code and expertise. Would you be looking for eventual, important productivity enhancements from those big intangible investments?

Jonathan Haskel   19:30
Yeah. And and again, Paul, if I may, I think artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, are two nice examples of the fusion of tangibles and intangibles. Could I just say a quick word about that before we talk about productivity? So again, if you think what artificial intelligence is, again, let's try an example to bring it to life for people. So Google cats is my favourite artificial intelligence example. Any three-year old can recognise a cat. If you ask a computer to recognise a cat, a computer has no idea. It's really hard. Computers get confused between a cat and a lion. A cat and a dog. A cat and a leopard. Some of them get confused between a cat and a table because a cat has got four legs. A table's got four legs and like I say, any three-year-old can do this. But the world's most powerful computers can't do this very well. So the Google Cats project as people will know, was an huge artificial intelligence, I mean it’s years old now but it’s an artificial intelligence project, essentially, to try to train a computer to recognise a cat. So what did it need? It needed incredibly fast computers, so that's a tangible investment. Like the buildings, like the vehicles we were talking about earlier on. That's a piece of machinery, running unbelievable software. That's what Google are incredibly good at. So that's the intangible investment, scanning gigantic databases, basically pictures of cats, as opposed to pictures of tigers and lions and tables, in order to train the computer to do all of that. And the database is, of course, another intangible investment. Again, the database isn't a sort of thing that you can kind of pick up, but it's a gigantic piece of information. So AI, Chat GPT is somewhat the same, right? Amazing software which scans gigantic databases to then write your essay for you, or whatever it might be. We wrote with this book, I must say, before ChatGPT. So it's all our work. No ChatGPT required! So again, it's the fusion of the tangible and the intangible. And so where does that take you? Well, again, it takes you back to what we were saying earlier on. Do we think that this is about to unleash an incredible productivity improvement because of all the amazing things that we can do with all of this -  or do we think it's just gonna take a bit of time to be introduced - you know, we're gonna have to wait for it. And again, we're not quite sure about all of that because we've got some examples which sort of point in different directions.

Sree Kochugovindan   22:35
So I guess one key theme that came out of the second book which we mentioned earlier, about institutions, and how institutions haven't kept up and definitely seem out of place considering what you said about AI. There are various implications of this. One that you mentioned, would be the increase in inequity across firms and profit markups over time. So how do you think this has really fed into some of the themes such as ‘greedflation’  or profiteering? Has that really arisen from this current market structure?

Jonathan Haskel   23:19
Yes, thanks Sree. Why don't we motivate that by means of another example if that  would be helpful, again to bring this to life. And this, I’m sure everybody knows about all of this, but I only learned about this recently and I liked it. And this is the Japanese knotweed example. So Japanese knotweed turns out to be an enormous hazard on railways because trains have gotta make their way through, you know, on the railway track. And the thing you mustn't have is you mustn't have lots of foliage.
Which grows onto the track, and that's really bad for trains and the foliage you mustn't have is Japanese knotweed. That's really, really bad. So the way that the rail companies used to deal with all of this is they would have skilled people who would sit in front of the carriage and just look out for Japanese, not weed, and try to spot it. And people had to be trained to in order to figure out what it was. And all of that. That's all finished now. A recent company who I was with have got a piece of artificial intelligence and it consists of a camera mounted on the front of the train. The train speeds along the line at 50/60 miles an hour. The camera takes pictures of all the foliage around which the train goes past, sends those pictures down some high-resolution cable. So far we're talking about very tangible stuff. What's the intangible angle? It then sends it to some gigantic database, which then scans all these pictures and the computer's been trained to recognise the Japanese knotweed from the picture, do you see what I mean, that the camera has taken as it zooms by. So that's the clever, intangible stuff. So what's interesting about that? Again, it's the fusion of the tangibles and the intangibles. So what about your question? The company who introduced all this stuff had a lot of difficulty raising finance in order to initially bring all this stuff to market. If the company had gone to the market and said, well, we can pledge a train to a bank that's sort of a very tangible piece or we could pledge a camera or something like that. These are very tangible things. Banks are often quite happy to lend against tangible style of assets. Instead, the company had to go to the bank and said we've had this very good idea about this Japanese knotweed problem. But it's hard to collateralise that it's hard for banks to lend against the security of a good idea. And it turned out to be a brilliant idea.

And it's being used all over the place. So, the institutional kind of difficulties are whether we've got the right, in this case, banking structure, to lend against these kind of intangible assets. And indeed then all the follow up issues. Can these companies scale up? Can they, once they've invented this, can they have follow on inventions and so on? So that's one of the institutional difficulties that potentially was stopping this company from starting and where that takes you, of course, is to whether we've got the right policy makeup, the right banking system and the right investment system. We are of the view that we've got a tangible investment structure around banking, but we're now in an intangibly economy and I think that's a problem which needs some attention.

Sree Kochugovindan   26:49
So another sort of angle from all of this is do you think that there are any structural implications for inflation? I mean some of the work, there's been a lot of work that we've done as well at abrdn, where we look at structural drivers like globalisation, different measures, migration, technology and how they can provide a long run, tailwind or headwind for inflation over multiple years, decades. I mean, how do you think the intangible economy might help? Would it help flatten the Phillips curve For example, the way globalisation etcetera has done over the past 20 years?

Jonathan Haskel   27:26
Yeah. So, broadly, there are a couple of challenges. One is back to the measurement challenge of course. It's much easier to, well, I was going to say it's much easier to measure the price of second-hand cars, but even measuring the price of second-hand cars that turns out to be very, very hard. It's much easier to measure the price of second-hand cars relative to measuring, I don't know, the price of a new computer programme, because new computer programmes do very different things to what old computer programmes do or measuring the price of an experience. If people go to, I don't know, Harry Potter World. That's very different the kind of experiential service goods which people went to previously. So one's got a, you know measure all that sort of stuff as well. So I think there's lots of measurement challenges when it comes to actually measuring the basket of inflation. I think the other issue is as you're saying Sree, broadly you'd think that this would be a tailwind for inflation and things would get more efficient things would get better and all of that.

And the Japanese knotweed example is a sort of plug and play example where you can literally plug this thing onto the front of the train and straight away you get a much more efficient train system and then you get a much more efficient way of detecting the knotweed and then you can send the crew to go and cut it all back and all that kind of thing. Lots of cost savings are going on there, which broadly speaking, should be efficiency enhanceing and should be good for inflation as well. On the other hand, we also know I think, that quite a few of these intangible investments -branding, that kind of thing, often require one to change the structure of the business in quite a profound way. So the move away from, I don't know, travel agents on the high street to internet travel agents has required a whole way of reinventing, rewriting software, reinventing how people do their travel booking, secure ways of paying, making sure that the website is a trusted website. All those kinds of things. That's not quite so plug and play. So that you'd think, that these are potential products for improvements and therefore inflation improving improvements, you'd think that they would take all these additional expenditures and probably take a much longer time to be implemented. So again, at base, I think there are probably tail winds. I think this is all good, but I think there's that the trajectory to getting there may take some time.

Paul Diggle   29:54
I want to put a sort of devil's advocate argument to Jonathan, which is that certain key themes in the global economy over recent years are about the resurgence in the importance of ‘things’, of tangibles. And you've kind of mentioned this already about the vaccine and various issues around there. And one can also think about other supply chain mismatches during the pandemic. You know shipping containers were in the wrong place. About as tangible as it can get. There's obviously a lot of global geopolitical focus now and access to critical raw materials, lithium, things involved in the energy transition, where high end microchips are produced. The war in Ukraine is obviously in many ways about access to a ‘thing’, you know, gas and energy supplies and so on. So how do you kind of meet this idea that, you know, the tangibles have struck back and they are actually very important in some of what's going on in the global economy at the moment?

Jonathan Haskel   31:04
It's thanks, Paul. It's a great question. And Ed Conway, who I think is Sky's economics correspondent, has got a really interesting book coming out very, very soon, which I'm looking forward to reading, which is about exactly this issue about the material world. I think that's the title of the book. So to look at a couple of things going on.  One is as we've just been discussing, a lot of these new goods are unquestionably a fusion of both the tangible and the intangible. So again, the vaccine, the example we started off with, you needed the intangible invention, but you also needed to ship this stuff around, and you needed the factories to build it in, and all of that. So I don't think there's any question that we're gonna need both tangibles and intangibles. I think that's one point. I think a second point, however, is that what seems like an essential, tangible investment might itself change. So if we think about the history of, I don't know, aerospace again, if we were doing this interview 100 years ago when propellers were made from wood and planes were made from kind of wood covered with cloth, you'd think to yourself, oh my goodness, if we were short of wood then we wouldn't have any aeroplanes anymore, right? Because you couldn't have a propeller and you couldn't have the leading edge of a wing because that's people carve that and all that kind of thing. Pretty soon that has all changed to metal, at which point you might think, oh my goodness me, if we had a sudden shortage of metals, because of a war or something like that, we wouldn't have any planes anymore. And pretty soon that was all changed to carbon fibre which is just produced just as a sort of man-made chemical. So I think there is a possibility that what seem like these essential, tangible inputs the world might substitute away from them. Now, what do you need in order the world to substitute towards something else is you need something intangible, that is to say, an idea. The idea got you from the wooden aeroplanes to the metal aeroplanes to the carbon fibre aeroplanes. You need a sequence of ideas. So it's the it's the intangible which does the shifting. But what one of the features of the intangible, as I say, if it can economise on those crucial tangible inputs, then hopefully we can make progress. So I'm hopeful. I think Ed Conway is absolutely right to point out that there are some precious rare earth metals and things like that that we haven't invented our way round yet. But I'm hopeful that with more intangible investment, we might be able to do that. But that takes us back to the issue about how we got enough intangible investment around. Have we got the right institutions and we've got the have we got the right structures, which is something we're a little worried about.

Sree Kochugovindan   33:50
So I guess that leads us to ask what is the solution? What is the optimal mix between private and public funding? How should the institutions actually change in order to encourage that innovation and investment that we so desperately need? So if we just finish up on the policy outlet or policy prescription and how should you restart the intangible economy?

Jonathan Haskel   34:16
Let me try three things. One is we're going to need I think more investment in public science. One of the ways that these intangible investments, all the examples we've discussed, is they often originate in scientific inquiry that was funded publicly. So the vaccine would obviously example of that. The mRNA technology didn't come out of nothing. It came out of years and years and years of public finance, and I think many governments are in tune with exactly that kind of issue. And I think one of the features of the British economy actually is, and this is not a party-political observation, both parties have funded British science, as in a non-partisan way. In many ways, it's been depoliticised. So David Willetts from the Conservative Party was instrumental in funding science. David Sainsbury from the Labour Party was instrumental in funding science as well. They were both them were science ministers.

And I say I think that's been depoliticised in a very helpful way. So I think that's one aspect and I hope that that will carry on. The second aspect is around banking and we've talked about banks before. We're going to need some reforms. I think there are some reforms along the way. People are talking actively about pension reforms, which obviously you'd be interested in as well. And then of course there are new ways of monitoring intangible investments, new databases, you know finding out, logging what patents firms have gotten, all that kind of thing. The third thing which we haven't talked about, which we talked about in the book, is planning. If I go back to the Harry Potter example, it's pretty unlikely that the synergies from the writer of Harry Potter, the computer-generated design, the actors, the designers, that those don't take place with, all due respect, in the countryside, they take place in cities and they take place in kind of creative areas in cities. So something around planning I think is gonna have to be rethought because we obviously don't want to concrete over the entire country and turn the entire country into a city. We clearly want some environmental benefit and so forth. That's obviously incredibly important. But on the other hand, if we severely restrict cities and towns like Oxbridge or Oxford, Cambridge, for example, building labs like Manchester, Liverpool, places like that. If we make it more difficult for both universities and also private companies to build labs. We make it very difficult for people to move there, right? Someone who wants to work in that kind of area, interact with other intangible creative people. If we make it all very difficult for people to do that, then there is a big cost to all of that planning. And so I think we need to have a bit of a rethink about the relative costs and benefits of the rather tight planning restrictions that we have at the moment.

Paul Diggle   37:13
Professor Jonathan Haskell, thank you so much for joining us on Macro Bytes. It's been a real pleasure. And a reminder that Jonathan and Stian's latest book is ‘Restarting the Future: How to fix the intangible economy’. It's a great read. It gets into all that we've discussed here and much more, and we thoroughly recommend it. Macro Bytes is on its summer holidays during July, so we'll be back in August with more insights into the drivers of global macro and markets. But until then, goodbye and good luck out there.

 

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