Dan M wrote:
...
>> 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.
>
> I think this is closest to what I think. But, I think that this is a
> fundamental and difficult enough concept to start slowly with some obvious
> examples.
>
> First, I was think of and will focus on the wealth of nations, communities,
> the world, more than individual wealth.
...
> So, historically, a richer nation would have vast areas of fertile farmland
> that could be harvested year after year to provide food for people. That
> wealth could be stolen by force, but absent of that, the wealth existed
> there. So, Italy was far wealthier than a corresponding area in Siberia,
> because far more food could be grown.
...
> involved) is somewhat arbitrary. But, the availability of human effort
> expended in something other than subsistence farming is not subjective; it
> can be objectively measured.
...
Dan--
O.K., you agreed mostly agreed with me, and I
mostly agree with you. Some of it is a matter
of interpretation: We're both taking the usual
meaning of "wealth", and trying to clarify it.
I had planned to get the total wealth of a
country but adding up the individual wealth
of its inhabitants (and of its institutions,
too?). So starting with individual wealth
made sense to me. Do you think that the wealth
of a (inhabited) country would be different
than the sum of the wealths of its inhabitants?
I think that a country that has more than enough
food for its people may be wealthier than a country
where everybody has just enough. Even if they
can produce the same total amount of food. Sure,
people can be a source of a country's wealth. But
starving peasants may not be worth that much, wealth-wise.
So there's more to it then just food production?
Unless you want to define "free wealth" and
"bound wealth". The free wealth of a land of
starving peasants may be almost zero. Most of
it being bound up in maintaining the large number
of inhabitants. A suitable plague could release
the bound wealth of the country by reducing the
population.
---David
The Dismal Science, Maru
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