“The serious fact is that the bulk of the really important things that economics has to teach are things that people would see for themselves if they were willing to see. And it is hard to believe in the utility of trying to teach what men refuse to learn or even seriously listen to.” — Frank H. Knight
Conflating the words money and wealth is an easy mistake to make because in most everyday parlance we use the two interchangeably — if you are wealthy, you have a lot of money, and if you have a lot of money, you are wealthy — without loss of comprehension.
But money is a measure of wealth, not wealth itself, just like kilogram is a measure of mass but is not itself mass. They are not the same. They have to be distinguished if we are to reason cogently about the nature and causes of wealth of people (and progress in our “inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations.”)
I have written a fair bit about wealth and money over the years. Time for a TL;DR version. Continue reading “What is Wealth?”
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 