Have you ever heard of the famous saying “sharing is caring”? Preschool teachers often use it to teach their young students that by sharing their belongings (toys, school supplies, etc.), the students take care of their peers. This saying not only applies to preschoolers but also to anyone who has goods, skills, and/or services that can be shared with others. According to PII co-director Mark Nelson, “these sharable goods, skills, and services are known as enduring assets and are the opposite of durable assets”, which are simply exchanged as opposed to shared. Similar to preschoolers sharing toys, people with enduring assets can care for others by giving something of value while still being able to retain it and give it to more than one person. It can be difficult to determine if one has any enduring assets and even more so to find people that desire those assets, but this blog post is here to help put you on the right track.

Durable vs. enduring assets 

Most assets and possessions that people think of are actually durable: cars, property, clothes, cash, etc. Durable assets are things that only one person can have value from or possess at a time. Renting a house, for instance, splits its value so that the owner retains the value of owning the house and the tenant receives the value of living in the house. Working hours are also durable, even though they are immaterial, since the employee gives the value of their time to their employer.

Enduring assets, like language proficiency, career networks, and coding and technological skills, can be possessed by multiple people at once without losing value. In fact, many enduring assets increase in value as more people have them; the more people there are that speak French, the more valuable the ability to speak French is. It is more difficult to put a dollar value on enduring assets since their value fluctuates almost constantly based on the exchange rate. However, from an investment standpoint, enduring assets have several favorable properties.

What exactly does “enduring” mean?

Enduring in a financial context indicates that goods or assets are networked, non-excludable, and non-rival. Networked goods increase in value when more people participate, and in turn create more wealth to invest in individuals. As more people learn French, fluency increases in value, and there are more teachers for those who do not speak French. Non-excludable goods are those that are nearly impossible to restrict access to, or those that cannot exclude certain people from using them. If we tell you that Ctrl + Z is a universal keyboard shortcut for undo, we cannot take that knowledge back. Non-rival goods have a supply that is not diminished by consumption. A national park, provided people do not actively litter on it or destroy it, is just enjoyable and accessible for the first hiker of the day as it is for the last.

How enduring assets can change the economy

Positive peace can be defined as a positive, beneficial connection between two individuals. We define positive peace as an enduring asset. Due to its networking effect, positive peace can grow in value by strengthening connections and in frequency by making more connections. It creates more value for the parties involved and offers the opportunity for more connections to be formed. Peace cannot be excludable, in the long-term, because the ability to establish connections in general cannot be restricted forever. Peace is also non-rival because one person establishing peace does not remove other people’s ability to do the same. It cannot be taken away after it is given.

Numerous journalists and economists argue that the government should incentivize or provide more funding for public goods, and some go so far as asserting that the private sector profits from public sector investment in itself. If people funded the creation of more non-rivalrous, non-excludable goods in the global economy, we will have fewer things to fight over. If we also fund the creation of networked goods, their value increases as more people participate in them, increasing the amount of wealth to invest in each other.

Good source opinion pieces: https://livingeconomics.org/article.asp?docId=239

Conclusion

Every individual has a set of enduring assets that they don’t usually think of as valuable to others. But because these assets are networked, non-excludable and non-rival, they actually have theoretically infinite value. One person’s enduring assets can be distributed then provide benefit and more people to benefit from them. As a call-to-action, analyze the skills that you possess to determine what you can give to others and what you could learn from others.

Written and edited by: Catherine Quinn, Neil McNair Jr., David Gerstenfeld, Dieondra Garner, Raaghav Seth, Jake Lieberstein, and Inesse Hanna