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That business model is known as two-part pricing. It's also known as the 'razor and blades' model, because that's where it first drew attention - sucker people in with an attractively priced razor, then repeatedly fleece them for extortionately priced replacement blades.

But how do assets become capital? How does the invisible web get woven? Sometimes, it's a top-down affair. Perhaps the first recognisably modern property registry was in Napoleonic France. Napoleon needed to tax things to fund his incessant wars, and property was a good target for taxation. So he decreed that all French properties would be carefully mapped and their ownership would be registered. Such property map is called a 'cadastre', and Napoleon proudly proclaimed that 'a good cadastre of the parcels will be the complement of my civil code'. After conquering Switzerland, the Netherlands and Belgium, Napoleon introduced cadastral maps there, as well. In the mid-1800s,

consultants continually find new problems to justify their continued employment - like leeches, attaching themselves and never letting go. It's a strategy known as 'land and expand'. One UK government ministry recently admitted that 80 per cent of its supposedly temporary consultants had been working there for more than a year - some for up to nine years. Needless to say, it would have been much cheaper to employ them as civil servants.

building a factory in an earthquake zone: just one bit of bad luck and the expensive investment might be trashed.

Women in the US now spend around forty-five minutes per day in total on cooking and cleaning up; that is still much more than men, who spend just fifteen minutes a day. But it is a vast change from Mary's four hours a day.

But the thing about land is, as Mark Twain once joked, that they're not making it any more.

John Warne Gates described it more poetically: 'Lighter than air, stronger than whiskey, cheaper than dust.' We simply call it barbed wire.

Martin Ford, the author of Rise of the Robots, points out that robots can land aeroplanes and trade shares on Wall Street, but they still can't clean toilets

The world still produces more bicycles than cars