I am skeptical of the distinction between "energy" and "raw materials." Energy, in the final analysis, is simply another raw material, not so different from many other.

The fundamental difference is between sustainable and unsustainable (use of) resources. Harvesting more of an unsustainable resource does not make you wealthier, for the same reason drawing down your bank account does not make you wealthier. Harvesting more of a sustainable resource (subject to the boundary condition that it remains sustainable) makes you wealthier, for the same reason getting a better paid job makes you wealthier.

Using resources more efficiently makes you wealthier, of course, for the same reason paying less rent on the same house makes you wealthier.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

4. Land ?

You can't be me, I'm taken

Wealth?

A state of well-being, defined by the individual.

Example: I'm a very wealthy person. I have adequate food and clean water ... I'll be hitting the grocery store later today and the Farmers' Market tomorrow. Love those tomatoes and corn.  Earlier this week I realized I was still having trouble walking over to the Sac State campus (tutoring just around the corner) and I said "Fuck It!", time to change priorities. I'm still recovering from almost checking out 2 years ago from pneumonia and walking is still a chore. My back is screwed up, that won't get any better, and sitting for 2 hours at a shot doesn't help. So guess what? I'm skipping tutoring until I can walk to and from the campus without running on fumes. Imagine that ... I'm telling the boss "I quit, until further notice!" You try that, peasants!

As I said, Wealth ... it's all in the head.

They tried to assimilate me. They failed.

There's the question, what is wealth, and there's the question, how much wealth is enough?

From the human perspective, I think wealth might be plotted on a 3-dimensional scale, where the axes are time, freedom, and comfort/quality.

Do you have enough time to enjoy your freedom and the quality of your material possessions?  Do you have the freedom to choose what to do and when to do it?  What degree of material comfort and quality is available to you?

The laws of compound interest and the murderous returns necessary to maintain current accumulated wealth, combined with a deeply entrenched aversion to creating money and giving it to those who need it, make it impossible to spread the immense bounty made possible by current productivity.  But how could this be fixed?

No accumulated income?  On what time-scale should this be measured?  Weeks?  Months?  Years?

Maximum working hours, so as to spread current employment opportunities more evenly, and increase free time for all?  How about 4 hours/day?

What to do about housing?

And for that matter, industrial planning?  How could  industries be induced to produce effectively and efficiently, avoiding both the sub-par quality and unresponsiveness of traditional Soviet-style socialism (where accounting techniques resulted in plant owners avoiding production for consumers at all costs), and the current over-production and over-efficiency of the current system?

I'm sorry for my deficient English expression. I think I should try to explain what I meant.

1. The word "income" is not what I did not like:  I did not like the "concept" of "being rich" = "having money", especially as socio-political objective, public and private, and as a synonym of "social wealth". I wanted to give a nuanced answer to your question: How can we arrange an economy so that we get richer?

2. I agree: it's important not to lose sight of the system as is, as well as the system we'd like. The system, as it's, requires "income" ("money"):  but to obtain "social wealth". Wealth is not getting money, although money is needed to get wealth.

3. We need increase societal income/wealth/well-being. The current crisis raises the question of to obtain the necessary wealth, the necessary resources. But, as we have to operate in the real -not utopian- world, we must ask, for the future without crisis, how we have to to obtain resources and also by the ideology that must underlie it.

4. Particularly if we consider countries in the European periphery - we need to find a way to improve their wealth that isn't dependent on out-trading other countries. Can we dispense with the global or transnational relationship in this world as it is?

Sorry...

Energy
Raw materials
Human labour

That looks like a very 19th century view.

I disagree with 'labour' as a value. When used physically, it's another form of energy and can mostly be mechanised.

But that's it's least valuable application.

Resources
Intelligence

Intelligence is the ultimate wealth amplifier. When insight and creativity are applied to a problem, new solutions become possible and resources become more valuable - either because they become more accessible, or because their social and utility values increase.

But I also think we need to distinguish between social/collective wealth, and personal power.

If I have more power than you I can pressure you to act in certain ways, with rewards and punishments to match.

In capitalist economies the first order rewards and punishments are financial.

In other cultures they're physical and/or political.

Problems happen when personal power is used to limit or destroy collective intelligence.

I'd suggest the true measure of civilisation is the extent to which a culture is dedicated to increasing collective intelligence and providing access to all of its benefits, or preserving and exalting personal power for a small minority.

European Tribune - Wealth?

Having said that - it seems obvious to me that a basic strategy for the whole of Europe, but particularly the periphery is to end the dependence on energy imports. If you have your own energy, a big part of your wealth puzzle is solved.

there's the nucleus right there! that's what makes it so staggering about the collective blind spot that allows the present dependence on hydrocarbons, with all its tragic corollary ramifications, from spills and pollution in extraction, the price gouging, the dirty deals, and the terrible effects on inner and outer environments.

monti has announced that italy is going to reduce its energy imports from 80+ down to 72%.

great, one may think, until it emerges that his plan for this is to drill for more oil off and onshore in italy.

aaaargh! why is this not being utterly ridiculed? why are the PIIG countries, all more dependent on fossil fuels, imported for the most part, still enriching the most polluting industries, responsible for so much degradation, when these countries (well, barring ireland!) are saturated with huge and growing solar energy going unharvested?

why are we so blind, why don't we insist on visioning that helps us break away from these terrible cycles of consumption/destruction?

because these energy companies are still trying to control their markets through monopolisation through capture of the political process through lobbying and suppression of the simple facts, that a reasonably inteeligent 12 year old can interpret as being a no-brainer...

that quoted para of yours holds the whole essence of why i come to ET, and why i believe that as long as we countenance the present imbecility with regards to european energy policies, notwithstanding the intelligent deployment of solar and wind we have seen in some parts of the EU, ironically in a country where the urgency is if anything milder, in that there is less sun and the national economy is in a healthier state.

the ability of all these studious wonks looking at the energy overview of the EU to overlook this simple truth, that could transform the balance sheets of the peripheral countries in the most radical and fundamental way.

if there is a future, historians will scratch their heads how so many people can have been so colossally stupid and gulled for so long. europe has least reason of this ignorance, as we have already made so much progress in these fields, we are world leaders, yet actions like monti's are not treated with the derision they deserve in this day and age.

what it will take to wake out of our collective trance, i shudder to think, seeing the depth of ignorant denial we swim in, wrt energy. it's completely auto-lesionistic and as hard to watch as someone beating themself on the head with a 2 by 4 and wondering why they have a headache, and then setting right back to doing it some more to cure the pain.

what kind of growth can you hope for when 70% 0f your energy is bought from the north? it's like taking an aspirin when you're losing quarts of blood from sawing off your own leg...

italy spain and greece should be able to provide massive amounts of sustainable, renewable energy. instead we fantasise about sucking it from the sahara and continuing to import our way there to prosperity. even if that still beats more fossil foolery.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

Anyway - at a basic level it seems to me there are three factors in the production of "societal wealth" if we take an overview.

    Energy
    Raw materials
    Human labour

I believe these leave out the most important factor - one that needs to be made quite explicit:

The ability to creatively reorder the structure of our society as needed to produce what we need.

Even though they did not have 'money', as we understand or misunderstand it today, the ancient Sumerians, the First Dynasty Egyptians and others more than three millennia ago did have this essential capability. Today most believe that 'There Is No Alternative' to the way in which decisions are made and implemented on reordering the society and, I would argue, that the ways in which this reordering is now being conducted is net more destructive that creative. Denying our ability to choose the means and ends towards which we reorder our societies leaves the process in the hands of those who make those decisions solely on the basis of the profits their corporations will realize from those decisions and argue that they must do this in the interests of the shareholders, who they routinely shaft, along with the rest of the society.

Raising this point is likely to get one labeled a radical, socialist, communist or as a deluded individual. But until we get across that the basic order of society CAN be changed in any direction we choose and that the decisions on that are the essence of real politics. Unless and until this point is won we are fighting on our opponents well prepared field of battle.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."

This key book by the UN may be informative for this discussion.  A key implication of their work on this is that intangible wealth accounts for bulk of the total wealth of the developed world (and even much of the wealth of the less developed world). Intangible wealth includes human capital, such as education, but it also includes social capital even more so, such as the institutions, formal and informal, which allow for people to go about getting what they need to maximize well being.  Once you include the intangible forms of wealth, it becomes quite hard to honestly draw any general conclusions about policy strategies for raw materials, labor, or energy since minor shifts in the institutional universe can greatly outweigh major shifts in natural resources or labor/population. Instead such conclusions are going to be very case specific to particular geographies and times.

 

I'm not so sure that this approach will lead to an improvement in overall well-being. If you come up with these three or four labels of "basic factors" in wealth, and then build a system that trades them against each other, then you will end up basically where we are now.

Where is the "happiness" factor, the "family togetherness" factor, the "pleasant landscape" factor, the "pleasant philosophical discussion" factor, the "educational background that enables reasoned debate" factor?

On the one had, everyone needs food, shelter, and clothing. Anything beyond those basic needs for physical survival must be traded off against the philosophical factors. For example, is a Buddhist monk more or less happy than a Wall Street banker? The monk uses (a lot) less of all of the basic factors that you list, and is, arguably, better off. Society needs to have that argument, of course, but if the answer is that the banker is better off, then we are back to where we started.

Alas, the current political focus is not on the wealth of societies, but on the wealth of bond holders, rentiers and such.

Governments are frenzied to address money growing needs of the global investors.

Or wealth in general?
________

It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver.
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Health is the greatest gift, contentment the greatest wealth, faithfulness the best relationship.
-- Gautama Siddharta

The first wealth is health.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

The greatest wealth is to live content with little.
-- Plato

Ability is a poor man's wealth.
-- John Wooden

He is richest who is content with the least, for contentment is the wealth of nature.
-- Socrates
________

Have to admit though, I become very grateful for the capitalist industrialization sort of wealth whenever my "first wealth" fails me and I need to go to the doctor, dentist, oculist, etc.

Point n'est besoin d'espérer pour entreprendre, ni de réussir pour persévérer. - Charles le Téméraire

Ticked off: How stock market decimalization killed IPOs and ruined our economy ~ I, Cringely

I wrote several columns on job creation over the last year, columns that explained in great detail how new businesses, young businesses, and small businesses create jobs and big businesses destroy them. Big business grows by economies of scale, economies of scale are gained by increasing efficiency, and increased efficiency in big business always -- always - means creating more economic output with fewer people.

Wealth creation is just as important as job creation in our economy but too many experts get it wrong when they think wealth creation and wealth preservation are the same things, because they aren't.

Wealth creation is Steve Jobs going from being worth nothing at age 21, to $1 million at 22, $10 million at 23, $100 million at 24, to $9 billion at his death 30 years later and in the course of that career creating between Apple and Pixar 50,000 new jobs.

Wealth creation is not some third generation scion of a wealthy family turning $4.5 billion into $9 billion over the same period of time, because that transformation inevitably involves a net loss of jobs.

The fundamental error of trickle-down (Supply Side) economics is that it is dependent on rich people spending money which they structurally can't do fast enough to matter, and philosophically won't do because their role in the food chain is about growth through accumulation, not through new production.