Wealth is What Money Buys
It's not so hard
For those who enjoy philosophy I recommend A. C. Grayling's Ideas that Matter. It's an interesting book. A bunch of short essays about philosophic ideas arranged in alphapbetical order without a table of contents. I call it a bathroom book - something short and interesting to read during those thoughful moments of the day. I was reading the passage essay on wealth today - and Grayling attributed an interesting idea to Aristotle - wealth is: "Whatever money can buy".
I couldn't find that quote from Aristotle; the closest I could find is this: "The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful for the sake of something else." --(from Nichmachean Ethhics found at http://pzazz0.tripod.com/id11.html)
I found this to be a refreshing inversion that money itself is wealth.
Grayling points out that according to Aristotle's idea the miser with a million unstpent dollars in the bank is as poor as the man who cannot spend for lack of any money.
Aristotle's idea here can include within the idea of wealth immaterial things like education and culture - that is wealth isn't only material.
But I think it's interesting what's left out of the Aristotle's idea of wealth.
Little things like love, happiness, health, reputation, etc
People do try to buy those things but many of us think that they have to be very lucky to get what they think they bought
Just like the rest of us have to be lucky to get the benefits of love, happiness, health, and reputation.
We can buy an education but not intelligence.
We can buy clothes but not a sense of style.
So people tend to think of intelligence as a sort of wealth - a sort that can't be purchased. But what if we think of those things as values and that wealth is a particular sort of value. For instance we have this concept of somebody who is poor in money but rich in happiness. What I wonder is where does this 'rich in happiness' linguistic construct come from? Why not just say that somebody is poor but happy?
I'm thinking in terms of sets here, and saying the set of VALUES includes the set of WEALTH as well as other sets like HAPPINESS and HEALTH. The conceptual advantage of this is that perhaps it makes it easier to deal with wealth and happiness as seperate areas to be considered. A lack of wealth is one thing and a lack of happiness. By keeping them conceptually seperate we can more easily resist the temptation to think that the lack of one is compensated by a surplus of the other. In fact, shouldn't a lack in any value be addressed in it's own right?
It's interesting that Keynes seems to have realized Aristotle's idea thousands of years later when he recommended that governments go into deficits when the economy is not prosperous. Unless money is being spent then wealth production plummets because nobody can afford to produce what isn't being bought. Which is of course a vicious circle. Keynes realized that money isn't wealth - that if the private economy isn't spending money then the government had to in order to enable people to produce the goods and services that are wealth.
One of the forms of wealth that money can buy is more money - this is what happens when people participate in some sorts of trade. That's what making a profit in retail means. That's what making a profit on the stock market means. That's what owning rental property means. It only works in certain circumstances but it certainly does work. If you get it going right then you end up with up with an exponentially expanding sum of money which can then turn into wealth like political influence.
Perhaps this can be seen as a paradox - the exponential expansion of pools of money threatens the very democracies that provided the environment that enabled that expansion.
How can we avoid that?
Perhaps one way is to think about what makes that catastrophic exponential explosion of pools of money? And clearly the thing that drives the explosion is using money to make money - basically lending at interest. But also the stock market and private investment.
What would a free market economy look like that didn't have a money market based on loans with interest?
What would a free market economy look like without a stock market. I'm not saying no investment - but the investment would be like buying shares in a Co-op that you can't sell to anybody but the Co-op at their face value.
What do you think?
I present regular philosophy discussions in a virtual reality called Second Life.
I set a topic and people come as avatars and sit around a virtual table to discuss it.
Each week I write a short essay to set the topic.
I show a selection of them here.