Being such a broad, general term, that is just as difficult as asking what is “good” or “intelligent,” so I will explain it here for how I use it.
In sociological terms, wealth is often defined as relative wealth or absolute wealth. Absolute wealth means that you have enough to buy food or other necessities. E.g. In the US, few people, if any, die in the US today because of starvation, therefore absolute wealth is high.
Relative wealth is the idea that even though I have a decent quality of life, I am relatively poor compared to much higher income earners and asset holders, which is referred to as the Gini index. So, while someone might make 2x as much as the average American, compared to the top 10% of income earners, they are poor in “relative” terms.
But, a more universal definition as it pertains to the human mind and these writings is: Wealth is the absence of risk for pain/suffering and death, and the degree/frequency of pleasure one can experience.
Here is how I arrived at that definition. Simply discussing life in terms of “dollars” does not tell you what those dollars can buy, and ignores many cost-free benefits of increasing comfort, such as the ability to gather information and the ability to learn right from within the convenience of your own hand, in nearly unlimited amounts, at any time, via free search engines and websites. How do you put a price on that? Libraries and archiving websites have millions of books for free. Blogs, news sites, and social media contain trillions of ideas.
Estimates of perhaps the greatest ancient library ever, at Alexandria, would be microscopic compared to the volume of information that is available today. In fact, Alexandria’s library could perhaps fit on a grain of sand if that sand were a hard drive.
Free knowledge, and free entertainment. Millions of movies, shows, fiction books, and video games may be available today at the click of a button, many of them free. Video-sharing websites collectively contain billions of videos today. Social media is an endless stream of entertainment.
It seems logical that if pleasure is one measure of wealth, then the absence of pain is also an equally important measure of wealth. All technology is designed to increase pleasure/ease, or reduce pain/effort. There may be rare examples of people inventing technology to make life harder, but that misses the point.
Medicine has continued to increase lifespans for generations. Anyone with access to a modern healthcare facility is rich. Just look at the infant mortality rates __________. Treating pain, wehter over the counter, in an ER, or at a therapist’s office, is incredible. Something as simple as ibuprofen or acetaminophen are miracle to me and signs of significant wealth of the modern world.
If you still think that you are rich, then you should know that even millionaires feel the same “Only 8% percent [with over $1M in investable assets] characterize themselves as wealthy.” (Ameriprise survey). Sure, with a typical home in California costing over a million dollars today due to inflation, a million is not what it used to be, however, it seems logical that many of those surveyed have considerably more than a million. On the other hand, owning a 20-year-old economy car, while living in a heated home, and having the freedom to travel, is very wealthy in my opinion. The perception of wealth is always relative.
Lots of changes are subtle. For example, the average home size has tripled in the last few decades, and yet with far fewer people per household on average. Square footage is not the only thing increasing. The ability for people to live independently has increased for over 100 years. Look at this chart of the elderly who can afford to live alone, instead of a typical three-generation family, which is the norm in many lower-income countries.
_____________
However, it can be seen than that if living alone is the result of being rich, then perhaps being rich is the problem, not the answer. Loneliness may be one of the greatest plagues of the world today, and wealth is what fuels it.
Returning to the topic of health, if science is able to “end death” and also create pleasurable experiences that are exponentially pleasurable at a continually lower cost over time, then I do not see how “income” really is a good way to measure wealth. If food and shelter will remain challenges, I actually do not think they will be much of an issue within a couple of decades. E.g. the ability to generate energy our cells need directly from the air (e.g. moisture electrical generation tech), and allow our cells to use it directly does not seem like science fiction to me.
As science marches forward century after century, every generation seems to be wealthier than the previous one, except for temporary declines caused by wars, depressions, and other catastrophes.
Is there a person in America today that is not richer in terms of convenience, comfort, pleasure, and access to knowledge, than perhaps everyone in the world combined just a millennium ago? Salt was once traded in its weight for gold. Ice cream was once the domain of kings. [find that google story of teh king who sent fleets to gain knowledge]
Coming technologies will make us so rich, we cannot fathom it in today’s terms, yet due to the hedonic treadmill effect, meaning we always get used to our new level of income/wealth, few may even notice. Few people think they are rich because they have salt or leavened bread, once a luxury in eras past.
If ease and safety are primary definitions of wealth, then AI will ensure perfect wealth as robots do physical work and AI thinks for us.
HumanIT 