If I can pay bills while increasing a savings account that would be wealth to me. I won’t lie…I have fantasized about winning the lottery. It inevitably comes back to ‘what would I gain having all that money?’. Playing the lottery is a fool’s game I have come to realize. Having all that money brings on strange aspects into one’s life.
As long as you’re not incurring debt faster than you save, that is wealth accumulation.
It’s as simple as that.
The vocabulary is vague.
Look, Faust, you are smarter than that but you seem to only recognize poetry when it suits you, I guess.
I’m sure I’m not.
Again - I am not taking a philosophical or ideological position on wealth. I’m just defining it.
OK but your limited definition does not jive with the English language definition of the same word.
Enlighten me, then. Remember, I am using the basic definition used in Economics.
Not the Hallmark Card version.
As per the title of this board.
No. You are using an accounting definition. There is a big diff.
You want to learn economics??
There is no “accounting” definition of wealth.
You wanna talk?
Then please get serious.
Well, being ‘free’ to do things or to get things and having the means to do or get something aren’t exactly the same thing, but I think you could say that not having the means to obtain resources is a restriction of freedom. As a citizen of the USA, I might be free to travel about within its borders – not completely free, of course, but definitely more free than people are in other, more restricted societies – but if I don’t have the money for a car & gas, or a plane or bus ticket, then I’m effectively restricted. I could walk, jump a train or hitch-hike, beg for food, I suppose, but it’s still the case that my freedom to move about is much more limited by the degree that I lack means to acquire my own transportation and food. Or I might be free to walk into a store where I-Phones are available, but without the money to buy one, I’m not free to take one home with me. I guess I have the freedom to break the law and attempt to take it without paying for it, but the risk is that I might be caught and forced to pay with the freedom I had to walk around in the first place.
So I’d say that degree of wealth conveys a degree of freedom in terms of access to the resources one needs or desires, at least the freedom from getting the resources ‘freely’ or unhindered by barriers like being only able to walk to places or going to jail for stealing. As far as ‘wealthiness’, I think that’s something different, and probably always relative once you get beyond the basics needed for survival. But the basic construct of wealth as freedom still applies.
I see “wealth” as synonymous with “goods”. Goods may be tangible like a house, a car, food, computer, toys etc. or less tangible like friends, family, health, courage, intelligence, wisdom.
For who? Isn’t too much savings considered bad for the wealth of “the country”? Or perhaps too much “wealth” is bad for financial health?
That makes a lot of sense to me. Can that kind of wealth be measured in a political context?
anon -
Again, I am not making an argument for the good or bad of wealth, I am just defining it. But wealth that serves no purpose can be bad for the economic health of the country, yes. A case in point is that there is, right now, a lot of unused capital in the US. That’s a temporary condition, though.
gotcha.
Does that make GNP or GDP a measure of wealth then? Or not?
No, those are measures of the economic activity of a nation.
I could make 100k but owe 300k and have 25k in the bank (I don’t, BTW). That would mean that I have no wealth at all.
It must be more complex than that, though, because your £300k of debt would hopefully have bought you a few assets or goods. Given how important ownership is within a capitalist society, that must stand for something.
It is much more complicated than that. Some goods retain value, though, and some do not. Wealth and standard of living are two different things, however. I am trying to keep the model simple, but real estate, for instance, is something most people with that kind of income have. But many do not own it outright. Most lottery winners (supposedly) go bankrupt in a few years. But they tend to live well before they do.
I heard on the radio recently that a significant proportion of British home-owners own outright (I can’t remember the exact figure, unfortunately), which I thought was quite surprising given how central “ownership” is to our housing market.
Given how central debt is to the structure of our economies I agree any rigorous definition of wealth would need to take it into account.
As a perspectivalist I would think you would recognize that wealth is whatever one values. It is all relative.