(FORTUNE Magazine) – Intellectual capital -- the knowledge necessary to make a product, which produces wealth -- has always existed, but in the future, the ratio of intellectual capital to materiel is going to continue to tip in favor of intellectual capital. Unless you have a management information system for the world today, you're in danger of making bum decisions based on yesterday's ball game. Present accounting systems enshrine bricks and mortar as capital. But they treat intellectual capital -- software, marketing, knowledge, all those things -- as an expense. If you say that's bassakwards, accountants and others say, ''Ah! You're cooking the books.'' They were right, 50 years ago. Take rock music. It's a kind of intellectual capital. It's made in the U.S., even though the discs often are pressed overseas. The American who sells foreign-made versions pays his taxes. But we ran a trade deficit because we paid the $2.50 to import it. That is why our balance-of-trade statistics have almost no relevance at all. Nobody knows what is actually going on. What you can't touch and feel -- intellectual capital, information -- is very powerful. Witness Eastern Europe. Rajiv Gandhi ((India's former premier)) said that a refrigerator in an American movie seen in the Third World was a revolutionary statement. That is, people living in a mud hut see this and say, ''My God, there's something else out there.'' He was right. I'm not saying there won't be another Tiananmen Square -- old power structures never give in gracefully. But Rupert Murdoch has movies on Chinese television every day. China has half a billion people watching The Sound of Music. There's the refrigerator.