Life requires physical consumption: oxygen, water, food. Consumption also includes deterioration through use, for further life-required values like clothing, shelter, transportation, security. Even highly abstract values like art/music/software/friendship/justice all rest on a foundation of consumable physical objects. Production is transformation of physical matter into consumable form.
Wealth is everything produced but not yet consumed. Money is easily exchangeable wealth.
The idea of wealth can be extended into intellectual or spiritual or poetic realms. But the root of the idea of wealth is the physical requirements for life.
Even highly abstract values like art/music/software/friendship/justice all rest on a foundation of consumable physical objects.
Hm, that doesn’t seem true to me. With friendship people derive value from simply sharing space and engaging in conversation, neither of which involve consumable physical objects.
Wealth is everything produced but not yet consumed.
What about things that we want but that don’t require production, like swimming in the ocean or enjoying the sound of birds chirping?
Money is easily exchangeable wealth.
PG calls out that money isn’t actually wealth. Is he using a non-standard definition? Does a standard definition even exist?
Hm, that doesn’t seem true to me. With friendship people derive value from simply sharing space and engaging in conversation, neither of which involve consumable physical objects.
Space for conversation is a form of shelter. But I will concede to condense a highly-condensed line of argument further to remove the trickiest examples: art/music/software/friendship/justice. Software is abstract; it’s also not physical in an obvious sense. It does rest on a foundation of physical objects (chips, wiring) capable of using electricity in a controlled and orderly way.
Ocean swimming and birdsong hearing are values but not wealth. ‘Values’ and ‘wealth’ both depend on ‘life’, and they overlap, but they are not synonyms. Wealth is fundamentally physical. It is fine to extend the concept into areas like software and intellectual property because the underlying physicality is always present. Also, people can and do use ‘wealth’ as metaphor. I avoid this particular metaphor for conceptual and communication clarity.
Like metaphors, people use all different kinds of word definitions. Some definitions are only synonym, some only description, some even contradict. Some people prefer fuzzy thinking and decline to define. My definition preference is the genus/differentia pattern (Aristotelian?): group to which [word] belongs and what distinguishes [word] from others in the same group. The genus of ‘wealth’ is ‘thing’, the genus of ‘money’ is ‘wealth’.
I believe the above definitions ‘wealth’ and ‘money’ are the most clear, and therefore the most cognitively useful. I prefer the most useful definition also be the standard one, but that’s a falling-star wish. [I’m fine with metaphor, just not the ‘wealth’ one. =D]
Life requires physical consumption: oxygen, water, food. Consumption also includes deterioration through use, for further life-required values like clothing, shelter, transportation, security. Even highly abstract values like art/music/software/friendship/justice all rest on a foundation of consumable physical objects. Production is transformation of physical matter into consumable form.
Wealth is everything produced but not yet consumed. Money is easily exchangeable wealth.
The idea of wealth can be extended into intellectual or spiritual or poetic realms. But the root of the idea of wealth is the physical requirements for life.
Hm, that doesn’t seem true to me. With friendship people derive value from simply sharing space and engaging in conversation, neither of which involve consumable physical objects.
What about things that we want but that don’t require production, like swimming in the ocean or enjoying the sound of birds chirping?
PG calls out that money isn’t actually wealth. Is he using a non-standard definition? Does a standard definition even exist?
Space for conversation is a form of shelter. But I will concede to condense a highly-condensed line of argument further to remove the trickiest examples: art/music/software
/friendship/justice. Software is abstract; it’s also not physical in an obvious sense. It does rest on a foundation of physical objects (chips, wiring) capable of using electricity in a controlled and orderly way.Ocean swimming and birdsong hearing are values but not wealth. ‘Values’ and ‘wealth’ both depend on ‘life’, and they overlap, but they are not synonyms. Wealth is fundamentally physical. It is fine to extend the concept into areas like software and intellectual property because the underlying physicality is always present. Also, people can and do use ‘wealth’ as metaphor. I avoid this particular metaphor for conceptual and communication clarity.
Like metaphors, people use all different kinds of word definitions. Some definitions are only synonym, some only description, some even contradict. Some people prefer fuzzy thinking and decline to define. My definition preference is the genus/differentia pattern (Aristotelian?): group to which [word] belongs and what distinguishes [word] from others in the same group. The genus of ‘wealth’ is ‘thing’, the genus of ‘money’ is ‘wealth’.
I believe the above definitions ‘wealth’ and ‘money’ are the most clear, and therefore the most cognitively useful. I prefer the most useful definition also be the standard one, but that’s a falling-star wish. [I’m fine with metaphor, just not the ‘wealth’ one. =D]