I’ve noticed a pattern, that wealth is privacy. If you take for example how people live.
- Homeless, outdoors. No privacy at all.
- Shared apartment
- Private apartment with shared outdoor space
- Private house
- Gated community
- Gated private estate
Or how people travel.
- Walking in the street in full public view
- On a bus or train or aeroplane
- In a car
- In a private convoy surrounded my staff, or in a private jet.
The poorest are always in public, in everything they do. The wealthiest are never seen, except when they choose to appear. There is a continuum in between of increasing wealth meaning increasing privacy.
But there are other possible perspectives. Wealth is the freedom to waste.
With wealth you can buy many things and leave them idle or dump them. You can travel and live and eat in wasteful ways. You can hire people to work for you, doing things you don’t really need.
Things which are expensive are (to a large extent) so because their production is wasteful. The rich can utilise more expensive things.
So the problem with too much global consumption - too much emissions, electricity usage, mining, etc - is really a problem of too many rich people. There is no point restricting or banning these things - people will just find other ways to be wasteful - maybe even worse ones. The only way to solve these crisis is reduce wealth, by reducing inequality.
Wealth is power over people. Wealth is required to compel people to do things, to directly pay them to do your bidding, or to access the fruits of hours of labour through purchases. There is also bribery, access to lawyers etc, which allow more wealthy people to exert more power over their peers and society.
Are there other ways to understand wealth?
Money is access to labor. Even if you’re buying a phone, you’re getting the labor it took to mine the lithium, design and run the factories, the people who assembled it, etc. I’ve been thinking about the idea that if you have friends, you are rich, because those friends will give you their labor if you cultivate the relationship. But the truly wealthy never have to do any labor they don’t want to do because people will clamor over themselves to do labor for them in exchange for the privilege to have others do labor for them in turn.
Now that you said the thing about privacy tho, interestingly that fits in with my idea, because if you have money, you don’t have to cultivate relationships to get the labor you need. But if you’re poor, you have to get the labor you need through friends
That is an interesting idea. I’m not sure I really get it though.
Normally an economist would say that your friends are giving you their time, which has a value, an opportunity cost. They expect something back which has value. Maybe you do labour for them too, or maybe you are good company. But to an economist just being good company has a monetary value, like how you pay to see a comedian.
Children have nothing. Their parents labour for them but get nothing back of monetary value.
If you live in a close community, people help each other without payment, as if everyone in the community is your friend. So maybe the community is like a economic person with a certain wealth.
You also remind me of the godfather films. People are eager to do favours for him, just to be called is friend. He has a lot of power just by having a lot of friends. He does no work, but can ask for favours (labour) from many people. He is rich, but his wealth comes from having many friends doing favours for him.
I don’t know how to make all this into a complete theory.