What is wealth?

I’m broadly discussing material wealth here and this isn’t aimed at the typical nostr audience. It’s more for people outside our sphere who I want to share with. It may, if I feel inclined, also become part of a series of simple texts on the nature and history of money.

This is also an experiment. It’s both my first attempt at a long form article on nostr and my first time writing one from my own sites brand new editor/publisher.

Is wealth money? If we print more of it, are we more wealthy? Obviously not. It doesn’t matter of it’s real money or fake money. It’s abundance does not make us wealthy.

Is wealth an abundance of material goods? Again, the answer is no. If a factory can make a billion widgets but no one wants widgets, no matter how cheap they are, the people are no more wealthy than before the widgets were created. Equally, they may really want the widgets but if they can’t get them then what’s the value?

So really, what is wealth? It’s not money. It’s not an abundance of goods.

It can therefore be only one thing; the capacity to satisfy wants and needs.

This holds true, as well, whether we’re discussing material, health or spiritual wealth. The capacity to satisfy those wants and needs is paramount.

If you’re poorly, you only want to get better. Many people might think that, because I live in a place with a bloody massive hospital, that in that regard, I’m wealthy. But despite its size and complexity, many people wait many months to satisfy their health needs. It doesn’t matter how big the hospital is, how well staffed it is, how skilled the workers are. If the need outstrips the supply, you’re poor.

The argument carries over well to spiritual wealth as well. In a place where you can gather with other followers of your faith and you can engage freely in pursuits which are important to your spiritual wellbeing, you are incredibly wealthy. But if you live in a place where you are repressed or unable to access those services and provisions you are less wealthy.

So, to the material. We know money isnt wealth, nor an abundance of goods. Only the capacity to satisfy your wants and needs dictates how wealthy you are.

Many people hate Jeff Bezos, because he’s a billionaire. But they’re all made wealthier because, thanks to Bezos, they can satisfy almost any material want and need for a fraction of the effort it would have taken at any point in history.

When you want something and you can pick up your little black rectangle, press the screen and have that good delivered to your door in under 24 hours you are infinitely more wealthy than the person who can only get those goods by travelling a large distance and spending hours digging through a huge store to be able to find that good, then transport it back home.

Do you remember when you’d actually have to get off your arse, travel across town, dig through shelves of goods, stand in a queue to pay then travel home with all your stuff? The time and effort have been reduced so dramatically that there’s no comparison.

And how do we count wealth, beyond the numbers on our screen, if not by effort expended. I keep being told we’re getting poorer, but I’ve run the numbers and they don’t check out. By every metric I could find reliable numbers for, over the last 30 years, we’ve become wealthier than ever. We work less to acquire more. We are literally the wealthiest humans that have ever existed. But the perception of many is that we’re poorer.

Obviously I’m going to blame some of that on the press and the state and the ever increasing desire of people to take what others have. It doesn’t help that they keep fucking with the numbers on our bank notes. How can you know if something costs more, or less, without doing the more complicated time/effort maths required to know, when they keep messing with the money supply.

Many bitcoiners believe, falsely, that in a world where we use the fixed number monetary standard that we’ll all be wealthier, but we won’t. It’ll simply be easier to decipher what the market is actually telling us at any point as the data will be less corrupted.

Make Bitcoin the world’s main currency, by all means, but if our supply chains are suddenly cut and we have to work more to acquire less, it doesn’t matter if we’re using bitcoin, dollars, gold or rai stones, we’ll all be poorer.

So really, wealth is logistics.

Last point, before I stop boring you, dear reader (assuming anyone got this far).

My mate is working in a factory. Recently, after several months of research, they moved a component from one part of the factory to another. That simple change saved hundreds of miles of walking every year, hundreds of work hours, many millions of joules of energy. The company gets wealthier and the staff get an easier life and the goods get cheaper. None of that increase in wealth came down to what money was used.