Dan M wrote:
> After the discussion about money as a social construct, it occurred to me
> that that there is something more fundamental underlying this. It is
> whether wealth is concrete or just an abstract concept.
Dan--
O.K., let me try. There is such a thing as "concrete" wealth.
Wealth lets an individual do things that they want to do. So
a person's individual wealth would be roughly defined relative
to some standard as the ratio of the utility of what they can
do to what they could do in the standard state.
Very crudely put, wealth equals relative happiness, but I didn't
say that.
I can fly to New Zealand, so I'm wealthier than I would have
been 500 years ago. Although there are no moa there now, which
I'd count as a loss of wealth.
> One way to ask it is whether the world is actually wealthier than it was 100
> years ago; whether the US is? A second is to ask who creates wealth and how
> do they create it? I have some strong opinions on this, but I hoped that I
> could stimulate a discussion by first throwing out the questions before I
> weigh in with my long winded thoughts. :-)
So by my definition, most people would agree that the world
and particularly the US is wealthier than it was 100 years
ago. A lot of wealth creation is caused by invention and
the development of those inventions. So even the lowly
consumer contributes to the creation of wealth?
---David
Mining gold, however, does not create much wealth. Most
people only want gold because everybody else does. Even
if we all had large piles in our front yards, we wouldn't
be able to do much more because we had it.
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