Data Standards for Living Human, Social, and Natural Capital 

William P. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. 
MetaMetrics, Inc. 
1000 Park 40 Plaza, Durham, NC 27713 USA 
+1-919-547-3408    wfisher@lexile.com 

Capital is brought to life when it is abstractly represented in titles 
and deeds universally recognized and accepted as additive, divisible, 
and transferable within financial and legal networks (DeSoto 2000; 
Latour 1987). Capitalism is criticized for focusing too exclusively on 
manufactured and liquid capital, and land, as manageable and accountable 
forms of living capital. No attention has yet been devoted to creating 
systems of transferable representations for human, social, and natural 
(environmental ecosystem) capital. Widespread interest, however, has 
lately been focused on the fact that third world and former communist 
countries lack the institutional infrastructure of transferable 
representations needed for bringing capital to life. Human, social, and 
environmental resource management sciences are akin to third world 
countries in that virtually all forms of human, social, and natural 
capital are also dead, represented as they are by nontransferable and 
scale-dependent metrics based in ability tests, and survey and 
performance assessment rating scales. Mathematical standards for 
meaningful measurement provide a philosophical basis and a practical 
methodology for making representations of human, social, and natural 
capital transferable across different instrument configurations, and 
across respondent samples. Legal metrology integrates the results of 
laboratory measurement science with the practical need for communicable 
standards. In the same way that attention to capital infrastructure 
facilitates the practical realization of property rights in the third 
world, attention to the calibration of transferable representations for 
human, social, and natural capital will facilitate the practical 
realization of human rights throughout the world.