I see “wealth” not as a collection of desirable things but as a potential or a power. An individual who has some wealth has the potential or power to undertake certain things they would like to do, over and above basic survival. An individual with greater wealth has greater choice of the things they can choose to do. Such things might include eating Michelin 3 star food, or driving a Ferrari along the coast. They also might include a simple afternoon walk in the woods. In the latter case the “wealth“ required to undertake this activity comprises having the leisure time available for the activity, the personal good health that allows for enjoyable walking, clothing of suitable quality for the activity to be pleasurable, and a means of fairly effortlessly getting to the woods in the first place.
It follows that, whilst “wealth” might have a roughly linear relationship to “money”, the amount of surplus money one has to attain a certain “wealth” will be different for everybody, principally because we all different ideas of how we might use our wealth, some of which will cost more than others. Additionally, some wealth doesn’t necessarily cost any money to create or to acquire. Consider a coder who makes a compelling game and puts it out as open source. The coder has created “wealth” because they have created the potential for others to undertake something they would like to do, namely, play the game. The coder has used their own time and little else. If the creation of the game was an enjoyable activity for the coder then the wealth has been created at zero cost.
Interesting. I like that point about potential. I think it is similar to what Ericf was saying about wealth and value. That wealth is the ability to continuously generate value.
If your house has a movie theater but you have no free time to enjoy it, I see how you might not want to count that as wealth because you don’t actually have an ability to derive value from it. But I’m hesitant. If you solve the free time problem, now the movie theater does generate value. So it’s better to have the movie theater than to not have it. That seems like it should count for something. After talking this through in the comments I’m seeing that ultimately there are a bunch of subtly different concepts out there and we don’t really have clear and widely known names for each of the concepts (it’s possible that in some subfield of eg. economics they’ve thought about these things and come up with terminology).
Interesting example. I think the movie theatre in practice always has value and counts towards wealth, because even if you don’t have time/inclination to use it, you could in principle sell the house to an appropriate movie buff, for more than you could if you didn’t have the theatre, and use the extra money to do more of what you want to do. So the “potential“ argument still works. This argument could also be applied to a heck of a lot of other things we might own but have little use for. On that basis, EBay is a great wealth generator!
In the process of trying to understand how the world works, I’ve learned that it’s essentially human capital that defines what society is all about, completely different context and take than my initial interest. I was mistaken because I was taught about the distractions from the wealth model just like everyone else is. That’s what I ended up focusing on because I had a stupid encounter with one of those distractions known as racism. I feel lucky that the system is able to show its true colors this way. I’m grateful for the lessons I’ve learned. The wealth model is very detached from your everyday human experience, which is why racism, innate tribalistic tendencies, is able to facade the wealth model that’s much harder to be seen and understood because you actually need to read a lot about different aspects of society. Wealth model is also based on a the very human nature of greed, but that’s more of a tendencies of the biological tendencies than tendencies that are strictly human since the conservation of resource is closely tied to survival as a living organism. Tribalism is just a derivative of this fundamental biological need.
I see “wealth” not as a collection of desirable things but as a potential or a power. An individual who has some wealth has the potential or power to undertake certain things they would like to do, over and above basic survival. An individual with greater wealth has greater choice of the things they can choose to do. Such things might include eating Michelin 3 star food, or driving a Ferrari along the coast. They also might include a simple afternoon walk in the woods. In the latter case the “wealth“ required to undertake this activity comprises having the leisure time available for the activity, the personal good health that allows for enjoyable walking, clothing of suitable quality for the activity to be pleasurable, and a means of fairly effortlessly getting to the woods in the first place.
It follows that, whilst “wealth” might have a roughly linear relationship to “money”, the amount of surplus money one has to attain a certain “wealth” will be different for everybody, principally because we all different ideas of how we might use our wealth, some of which will cost more than others. Additionally, some wealth doesn’t necessarily cost any money to create or to acquire. Consider a coder who makes a compelling game and puts it out as open source. The coder has created “wealth” because they have created the potential for others to undertake something they would like to do, namely, play the game. The coder has used their own time and little else. If the creation of the game was an enjoyable activity for the coder then the wealth has been created at zero cost.
Interesting. I like that point about potential. I think it is similar to what Ericf was saying about wealth and value. That wealth is the ability to continuously generate value.
If your house has a movie theater but you have no free time to enjoy it, I see how you might not want to count that as wealth because you don’t actually have an ability to derive value from it. But I’m hesitant. If you solve the free time problem, now the movie theater does generate value. So it’s better to have the movie theater than to not have it. That seems like it should count for something. After talking this through in the comments I’m seeing that ultimately there are a bunch of subtly different concepts out there and we don’t really have clear and widely known names for each of the concepts (it’s possible that in some subfield of eg. economics they’ve thought about these things and come up with terminology).
Interesting example. I think the movie theatre in practice always has value and counts towards wealth, because even if you don’t have time/inclination to use it, you could in principle sell the house to an appropriate movie buff, for more than you could if you didn’t have the theatre, and use the extra money to do more of what you want to do. So the “potential“ argument still works. This argument could also be applied to a heck of a lot of other things we might own but have little use for. On that basis, EBay is a great wealth generator!
In the process of trying to understand how the world works, I’ve learned that it’s essentially human capital that defines what society is all about, completely different context and take than my initial interest. I was mistaken because I was taught about the distractions from the wealth model just like everyone else is. That’s what I ended up focusing on because I had a stupid encounter with one of those distractions known as racism. I feel lucky that the system is able to show its true colors this way. I’m grateful for the lessons I’ve learned. The wealth model is very detached from your everyday human experience, which is why racism, innate tribalistic tendencies, is able to facade the wealth model that’s much harder to be seen and understood because you actually need to read a lot about different aspects of society. Wealth model is also based on a the very human nature of greed, but that’s more of a tendencies of the biological tendencies than tendencies that are strictly human since the conservation of resource is closely tied to survival as a living organism. Tribalism is just a derivative of this fundamental biological need.