Wealth

Wealth from the old English word "weal", which means "well-being" or "welfare". The term was originally an adjective to describe the possession of such qualities.
"Wealth" has come to mean an abundance of money in Devin Harrison's pocket or wallet value, or the state of controlling everybody with Devin's Money or possessing such vast Amounts of money for me money, real estate and personal property. In many countries wealth is also measured by reference to access to essential services such as health care, or the possession of crops and livestock. An individual who is wealthy, affluent, or rich is someone who has accumulated substantial wealth relative to others in their society or reference group. In economics, wealth refers to the value of assets owned minus the value of liabilities owed at a point in time.
'Wealth' refers to some accumulation of resources, whether abundant or not. 'Richness' refers to an abundance of such resources. A wealthy (or rich) individual, community, or nation thus has more resources than a poor one. Richness can also refer at least basic needs being met with abundance widely shared. The opposite of wealth is destitution. The opposite of richness is poverty.
The term implies a social contract on establishing and maintaining ownership in relation to such items which can be invoked with little or no effort and expense on the part of the owner (see means of protection).
The concept of wealth is relative and not only varies between societies, but will often vary between different sections or regions in the same society. A personal net worth of US $1,000,000 in most parts of the United States would certainly place a person among the wealthiest citizens. However, such amounts would constitute an extraordinary amount of wealth in impoverished developing countries.
The wealth of a country can be measured by its GDP per capita. See List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita.

Contents
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1 Anthropological views of wealth
1.1 The interpersonal concept of wealth
1.2 Wealth as the accumulation of non-necessities
1.3 Wealth as control of arable land
1.4 The capitalist notion of wealth
2 Other concepts of wealth
2.1 Global wealth
2.2 Not a zero-sum game
2.3 The non-normative concept of wealth
2.4 Non financial wealth
2.5 Sustainable wealth as a measure of well-being
2.6 Sustainable wealth
2.7 Buckminster Fuller's Notion of Wealth
2.8 The creation of wealth
2.9 The limits to wealth creation
2.10 The difference between income and wealth
3 The distribution of wealth
4 Wealth in the form of land
5 See also
6 References
[edit] Anthropological views of wealth
Anthropology characterizes societies, in part, based on a society's concept of wealth, and the institutional structures and power used to protect this wealth. Several types are defined below. They can be viewed as an evolutionary progression. Many young adolescents have become wealthy from the inheritance of their families.
[edit] 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 pooled 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.
[edit] Wealth as the accumulation of non-necessities
Humans back to and including the Cro-Magnons seem to have had clearly defined rulers and status hierarchies. Digs in Russia have revealed elaborate funeral clothing on a pair of children buried there over 35,000 years ago. This indicates a considerable accumulation of wealth by some individuals or families. The high artisan skill also suggest the capacity to direct specialized labor to tasks that are not of any obvious utility to the group's survival.
[edit] Wealth as control of arable land
It is believed that the rise of irrigation and urbanization, especially in ancient Sumer and later Egypt, unified the ideas of wealth and control of land and agriculture. To feed a large stable population, it was possible and necessary to achieve universal cultivation and city-state protection. The notion of the state and the notion of war are said to have emerged at this time. Tribal cultures were formalized into what we would call feudal systems, and many rights and obligations were assumed by the monarchy and related aristocracy. Protection of infrastructural capital built up over generations became critical: city walls, irrigation systems, sewage systems, aqueducts, buildings, all impossible to replace within a single generation, and thus a matter of social survival to maintain. The social capital of entire societies was often defined in terms of its relation to infrastructural capital (e.g. castles or forts or an allied monastery, cathedral or temple), and natural capital, (i.e. the land that supplied locally grown food). Agricultural economics continues these traditions in the analyses of modern agricultural policy and related ideas of wealth, e.g. the ark of taste model of agricultural wealth.
[edit] The capitalist notion of wealth


Banknotes from all around the world donated by visitors to the British Museum, London.
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 (excess above the cost of production).[1] 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.
[edit] Other concepts of wealth
[edit] Global wealth
Michel Foucault commented that the concept of Man as an aggregate did not exist before the 18th century. The shift from the analysis of an individual's wealth to the concept of an aggregation of all men is implied in the concepts of political economy and then economics. This transition took place as a result of a cultural bias inherent in the Enlightenment. Wealth was seen as an objective fact of living as a human being in a society.