I’ve noticed a pattern, that wealth is privacy. If you take for example how people live.

  1. Homeless, outdoors. No privacy at all.
  2. Shared apartment
  3. Private apartment with shared outdoor space
  4. Private house
  5. Gated community
  6. Gated private estate

Or how people travel.

  1. Walking in the street in full public view
  2. On a bus or train or aeroplane
  3. In a car
  4. In a private convoy surrounded my staff, or in a private jet.

The poorest are always in public, in everything they do. The wealthiest are never seen, except when they choose to appear. There is a continuum in between of increasing wealth meaning increasing privacy.

But there are other possible perspectives. Wealth is the freedom to waste.

With wealth you can buy many things and leave them idle or dump them. You can travel and live and eat in wasteful ways. You can hire people to work for you, doing things you don’t really need.

Things which are expensive are (to a large extent) so because their production is wasteful. The rich can utilise more expensive things.

So the problem with too much global consumption - too much emissions, electricity usage, mining, etc - is really a problem of too many rich people. There is no point restricting or banning these things - people will just find other ways to be wasteful - maybe even worse ones. The only way to solve these crisis is reduce wealth, by reducing inequality.

Wealth is power over people. Wealth is required to compel people to do things, to directly pay them to do your bidding, or to access the fruits of hours of labour through purchases. There is also bribery, access to lawyers etc, which allow more wealthy people to exert more power over their peers and society.

Are there other ways to understand wealth?

  • @roastpotatothiefOP
    2•11 months ago

    privacy has a material cost. physical walls aren’t cheap

    I think you are right. Privacy is a commodity. It is a resource that people want, that has cost. So the increasingly wealthy can afford more of it. Yes, this has to be the right explanation.

    lack of mixing between classes

    Classes have to be separate. If there is too much wealth inequality, vendors want to maximise profit, so they adjust prices to what the wealthiest can afford, so the poor will starve. The poor have to move to poor areas. So in each area inequality is limited. There is a maximum regional inequality, before people starve. Think of gentrification.

    The rich also choose to isolate themselves from the poor. I guess that’s to get access to higher quality amenities.

    i think a certain amount of what you see is

    I guess so. smaller number of rich people = less anonymity for the rich. More ostentatious lifestyles are conspicuous. These go against the general trend of wealth = privacy. I didn’t think of this.

    if i were pressured to provide a definition of wealth

    This is also a good perspective. Wealth is security. You can buy or accumulate security. Security against nature or people or death. I see now that my privacy argument is just a special case of conventional economic theory. The “security” angle is an equally interesting special case.