Capital is seen as anything that helps us achieve our goals, while improving the efficiency of the goods and services we use or produce. Capital is one of the main attributes of improvement. Capital can be almost anything, it can be mental (like education or training), material (like a computer or machine) or it can be money. Capital is invested in a good or service to increase production efficiency, to increase output, and to increase profit and overall consumer satisfaction. Capital is an important part of markets and the economy. In order to continue investing capital, sometimes consumption levels must be reduced in order to collect or save more capital. When you open a savings account, the interest you earn is actually paid by the companies that use your money as capital. You may have given up shopping every month to save your money. While you are saving, someone is paying interest (your capital) on the money you have saved, because they borrowed it to pay for capital investments such as land, building, machinery, etc. in order to improve its overall production. If we look at capital in a work environment, we see that when we increase capital goods for workers, they can be more productive. It works to a certain extent. The law of diminishing returns states that a general increase in production occurs when capital goods per worker increase, but there comes a point when each increase in capital goods produces a smaller impact on production. At this point, the number of human capital (workers) must be increased to utilize the capital equipment already in place and continue to improve efficiency. An example of this is the cliché “too many cooks in the kitchen”. If you have too many cooks, you need to increase the number of pots and ingredients. When you increase the number of pots and ingredients, cooks can work more efficiently and produce more. When you receive too many pots and ingredients and cooks come and go, efficiency decreases. You might get even more production, but not at the same rate when each cook had their own pot and ingredients. At this point, you need to bring in more cooks (human capital) to increase production efficiency and output again. The same goes for capital markets and the economy..