Home - What is Wealth
Wealth in a nutshell
- Wealth isn't really money, it's anything that living things need like food, water and shelter.
- Inanimate things don't need wealth but they can create it (assembly-line robots).
- Animals can create wealth. Birds build nests, beavers create dams.
How To Kill A Country With Money !
It's not money that keeps things going, it's what we all do to get that money that is important. Just suppose that everyone in the UK was given £10,000,000 what would happen ? You might think that all their problems are solved, but you would be wrong. Here's how it would play-out :-
- You wake up and get an email which says you now have £10M in your account.
- After you've finished jumping up and down, you decide to skip work and have a mega-party.
- You call your friends, who also have £10M, invite them to your place and ask then to bring some food, wine and Champagne.
- You get dressed and go to the local supermarket to find that only a few staff are there and the selves are mostly empty.
- When you enquire they say that there were no deliveries because the truck drivers were now multi-millionaires and had decided to stay in bed.
- You buy what you can and go home.
- Your friends turn-up with very little because their supermarkets were closed or empty.
If I were to catch a small fish and cook it, I have created a tiny bit of wealth for myself. If I then go and catch a large number of fish, cook them and serve them to my friends, I have created a large amount of wealth for me and my friends - no money required. It's possible to have little money but be very wealthy. On the other hand if you were on a desert island with £1,000,000 you wouldn't be wealthy because there is nothing to spend the money on. If someone turned up with a days food how much would you be prepared to pay for it ?
So, money isn’t really wealth, just a compressed, portable expression of it. Money allows you carry your wealth around in a small wallet instead of a huge truck.
Wealth also follows Maslows hierarchy of needs; if your friends are dying of thirst and/or hunger, they won't be interested in the iPad you've carved out of some driftwood but they might be interested in the spear you made earlier.
Being independent means understanding how to create wealth that other people will find useful and will be willing to pay for.
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