The world economy desperately needs more productive investment: to create jobs, to increase productivity and to meet critical global goals like combating climate change. But instead of more productive investment, we are getting rising stock markets. Sadly too many policymakers and journalists don’t know the difference. Let’s start off with the basic confusion. Investment is when savings are used to pay for the creation of new productive assets–improvements in land, new buildings, machinery, computer software, the education of workers to create human capital.