Wealth
Wealth usually refers to money and property. It is the
abundance of objects of value and also the state of having
accumulated these objects. The use of the word itself
assumes some socially-accepted means of identifying objects,
land, or money as "belonging to" someone, i.e.
a broadly accepted notion of property and a means of protection
of that property that can be invoked with minimal (or,
ideally, no) effort and expense on the part of the owner.
Concepts of wealth vary among societies.
A person that is wealthy or rich is someone that has accumulated
substantial wealth relative to others in that society
or reference group. The state of being wealthy is a relative
term. Within the United States, having a net worth of
$500,000 in the Midwest certainly places you among the
region's wealthiest citizens, yet that same net wealth
would be considered quite modest on New York City's Upper
East Side. A person considered wealthy in West Africa
may not be considered wealthy in Southern France.
The interpersonal concept of wealth
Early hominids seem to have started with incipient ideas
of wealth, similar to that of the great apes. But as tools,
clothing, and other mobile infrastructural capital became
important to survival (especially in hostile biomes),
ideas such as the inheritance of wealth, political positions,
leadership, and ability to control group movements (to
perhaps reinforce such power) emerged.
Neandertal societies had elaborate funerary rites and
cave painting which implies at least a notion of shared
assets that could be spent for social purposes, or preserved
for social purposes. Wealth may have been collective.
The capitalist notion of wealth
Industrialization emphasized the role of technology. Many
jobs were automated. Machines replaced some workers while
other workers became more specialized. Labour specialization
became critical to economic success. However, physical
capital, as it came to be known, consisting of both the
natural capital (raw materials from nature) and the infrastructural
capital (facilitating technology), became the focus of
the analysis of wealth. Adam Smith saw wealth creation
as the combination of materials, labour, land, and technology
in such a way as to capture a profit. The theories of
David Ricardo, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and later,
Karl Marx, in the 18th century and 19th century built
on these views of wealth that we now call classical economics
and Marxian economics (see labor theory of value). Marx
distinguishes in the Grundrisse between material wealth
and human wealth, defining human wealth as "wealth
in human relations"; land and labour were the source
of all material wealth.
waelth, welth, ealth, wealht
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