There are national accounts, and national intangible assets. Our ability to account for the latter may be no better than what we show on corporate balance sheets. Worst, absent an indicator like market capitalization that reminds us that there is significant value in excess of book (x2-3), we may not even be aware of them.

National Public Radio’s Planet Money, a multimedia team covering the global economy, recently aired a program in which the benefit of the overarching term we use at the Society, reputation, was addressed in a geopolitical setting.

We used to talk about the G-7 — the world's seven biggest economic powerhouses. Every so often, the leaders of the G-7 countries would get together and hash out the important issues facing the global economy. That grew to become the G-20, which included big players in the developing world (China, India, Brazil). In the heat of the financial crisis, the G-20 made a good show of cooperation. But as the crisis has faded, so has the cooperation. What's left is a world where there's no clear economic leadership. That creates a new set of problems, David Gordon says. Gordon, research director at the consulting firm Eurasia Group, calls this new world "G-Zero."

The G-Zero is a concept that acknowledges that there is no longer any center of power and marks the end of the most recent era where the one remaining superpower provided global leadership.

According to Gordon, “the United States reputationally has been weakened by the financial crisis – blamed for it – and our model of capital markets and all of this, combined, are no longer seen as things that countries should aspire to. That reputation hit, combined with our own relatively weak recovery and fiscal challenges, means that we are no longer able to give the kind of leadership to the world economy that we did forever.”

Listen to the NPR Planet Money G-Zero podcast on the NPR website (click here) or to the current Planet Money program (click below).