Asset Value Analysis, revised (9 September 2026)

[LLM Report]

Asset Value Analysis (AVA) provides a powerful, multi-scalar framework that bridges long-standing divides in economic history, institutional economics, and global macro-sociology. By synthesizing Partha Dasgupta’s multi-capital accounting framework (natural, human, physical, and social capital) with Immanuel Wallerstein’s World-Systems Analysis, this long-run global asset map (3500 BCE to 2020 CE) makes several crucial contributions to contemporary scholarship:

1. Reconciling Quantitative Econometrics with Qualitative “New Histories of Capitalism”

For decades, economic history has experienced a tension between quantitative cliodynamics/Maddisonian GDP reconstructions and qualitative historical analyses (e.g., Sven Beckert, Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist).

• The Contribution: GDP measures only annual flow, often obscuring structural extraction, wealth accumulation, and uncompensated labor. By focusing on the aggregate capital stock envelope () and incorporating a Micro-AVA beneficial ownership metric (), the model quantifies how capital flows were historically extracted from enslaved, indigenous, and colonized populations to capitalize European and North American asset expansion.

2. Operationalizing World-Systems Theory Across Deep Time (3500 BCE – 2020 CE)

Wallerstein’s World-Systems Theory effectively explains core-periphery dynamics, but often lacks a continuous, empirical unit of measurement for imperial transitions prior to the 16th century.

• The Contribution: By applying an index-linked deflator () and tracking spatial network friction () across pre-modern, early modern, and modern eras, the map establishes a single, continuous benchmark. It charts the geographic migration of primary global asset density—from early riverine cores (Mesopotamia, Egypt) to the Gangetic Plain, Mediterranean, Song China, Pax Britannica, and ultimately the 20th-century American Sunbelt shift—demonstrating how spatial integration directly scales capital valuation multipliers ().

Image 2. Using a manifold to track the evolution of California as a market economy shows more detail about contraction and expansion in the context of multiple historical causes.

Image 3. A first look at the econometric impact of asset loss, stagnation, and growth in Minnesota’s three largest African-American communities, 1950-2020.

Image 4. Comparative historical manifolds show new dimensions of spatial urbanism, economic expansion, and macroeconomic impact on the evolution of the Twin Cities, 1950-2020.