Yale professor Douglas W. Rae opens his course Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform with a definition of capital as accumulated wealth used to produce more wealth, then works through what actually counts as capital. He frames the central story of modern economic history as the shift from labor intensive to capital intensive production, arguing that the differing speeds and scales of that transition across countries explain much of today's global income disparity. Rae then lays out the defining characteristics of capitalism as a system before walking through the semester's course outline and agenda. Recorded in Fall 2009 as the first lecture in Yale's Open Yale Courses series, it sets up the analytical vocabulary the rest of the course will use, running just under 46 minutes with clear chapter breaks between introduction, capital, capitalism, and course logistics.