The 9 Life Capitals
Money is one type of wealth. The Wealth School counts nine, which it calls the 9 Life Capitals: nine capital kinds, each defined by the characteristic human capacity that anchors it.
- Financial Capital — the capacity to acquire, preserve, allocate, mobilize, and steward economic resources across time.
- Intellectual Capital — the capacity to acquire, generate, organize, integrate, and apply knowledge, understanding, judgment, and wisdom.
- Social Capital — the capacity to create, access, participate in, and benefit from networks, communities, institutions, and collective trust.
- Relational Capital — the capacity to form, sustain, repair, deepen, and wisely navigate meaningful interpersonal relationships.
- Emotional Capital — the capacity to perceive, regulate, express, recover from, and constructively employ emotional experience in oneself and others.
- Life Force Capital — the capacity to generate, maintain, restore, and direct vitality, energy, health, resilience, and embodied agency.
- Creative Capital — the capacity to imagine, create, innovate, express, and bring novel value into existence.
- Spiritual Capital — the capacity to experience meaning, purpose, coherence, transcendence, and alignment with values larger than immediate self-interest.
- Time Capital — the capacity to direct, structure, protect, allocate, and meaningfully employ one’s finite lifetime.
Other maps of wealth count five, eight, even nine kinds. The 9 Life Capitals are this set: nine capitals named by the capacity each one rests on, read together in one finite life and never summed into one number.
- Defined by
- Ryna Mi, The Wealth School
- First set out
- Existential Portfolio Theory, §4 “The Nine Life Capitals”, canonical manuscript v2.0, June 2026; open edition v1.0, 22 August 2026
- Cite as
- Mi, R. (2026). Existential Portfolio Theory: A multi-capital theory of wealth for a single, finite life (v1.0). The Wealth School. doi:10.5281/zenodo.22057070
Stewardship Intelligence
Stewardship Intelligence: the capacity to recognise, cultivate, coordinate, and transmit multiple forms of value across time in ways that increase flourishing while preserving the vitality, adaptability, and stewardship capacity of those who follow.
A human capacity, formed in people. Financial expertise can be hired. Stewardship Intelligence cannot.
The same two words also name software for institutional investors — Root has used them since 2024, Diligent since April 2026 — for proxy-voting and engagement data. The Wealth School’s term names a human capacity, not a data product.
- Defined by
- The Wealth School – Institute of Stewardship Intelligence
- Published at
- Wealth Stewardship · The Ground; A Founding Letter
- Trademark
- “The Wealth School – Institute of Stewardship Intelligence”, Swiss registration no. 849473 (classes 35, 41), registered 1 June 2026
Wealth Stewardship
Wealth stewardship is the study and practice of holding wealth well — cultivating and renewing the many forms of wealth, and forming the people who hold them, across time and generations.
Wealth management optimises an asset. Wealth stewardship holds a life.
- Published at
- Wealth Stewardship · The Ground
Existential Portfolio Theory
Existential Portfolio Theory (ExPT), developed by Ryna Mi, is the founding theory of multi-capital wealth stewardship — an account of wealth as nine interdependent capitals held in one finite life, where order matters as much as amount.
- Defined by
- Ryna Mi (ORCID 0009-0003-5888-2958)
- First set out
- Canonical manuscript v2.0, June 2026; open edition v1.0 under CC BY 4.0, 22 August 2026
- Cite as
- Mi, R. (2026). Existential Portfolio Theory: A multi-capital theory of wealth for a single, finite life (v1.0). The Wealth School. doi:10.5281/zenodo.22057070 · PDF · The Theory
The definitions above are quoted word for word from the School’s published texts. When a text changes, this page changes with it and the date of the change is recorded here.