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?

  • @nadiaraven@beehaw.org
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    610 months ago

    Money is access to labor. Even if you’re buying a phone, you’re getting the labor it took to mine the lithium, design and run the factories, the people who assembled it, etc. I’ve been thinking about the idea that if you have friends, you are rich, because those friends will give you their labor if you cultivate the relationship. But the truly wealthy never have to do any labor they don’t want to do because people will clamor over themselves to do labor for them in exchange for the privilege to have others do labor for them in turn.

    Now that you said the thing about privacy tho, interestingly that fits in with my idea, because if you have money, you don’t have to cultivate relationships to get the labor you need. But if you’re poor, you have to get the labor you need through friends

    • @roastpotatothiefOP
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      110 months ago

      That is an interesting idea. I’m not sure I really get it though.

      Normally an economist would say that your friends are giving you their time, which has a value, an opportunity cost. They expect something back which has value. Maybe you do labour for them too, or maybe you are good company. But to an economist just being good company has a monetary value, like how you pay to see a comedian.

      Children have nothing. Their parents labour for them but get nothing back of monetary value.

      If you live in a close community, people help each other without payment, as if everyone in the community is your friend. So maybe the community is like a economic person with a certain wealth.

      You also remind me of the godfather films. People are eager to do favours for him, just to be called is friend. He has a lot of power just by having a lot of friends. He does no work, but can ask for favours (labour) from many people. He is rich, but his wealth comes from having many friends doing favours for him.

      I don’t know how to make all this into a complete theory.

  • @colin@lemmy.uninsane.org
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    110 months ago

    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.

    your presumption here seems to be that individuals will engage in pollutive activity when pressured to do so for the benefit of someone else (via the demands of wealth), but never for themselves (the hypothetical in which they’re less subjected to the demands of wealth). i’m not sure this is generally true — it may be only narrowly true in that without capital structures the benefit of any individual engaging in any pollutive activity — e.g. transport by automobile — would not be worth the work of accumulating the resources needed for that activity (e.g. fossil fuels). whereas with the markets which wealth creates, the cost/benefit looks substantially different.

    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

    privacy has a material cost. physical walls aren’t cheap. being physically distant from your neighbor isn’t cheap (distance demands lengthier roads, pipes, powerlines).

    on the other hand the most expensive land tends to be in the densest places. that is, people with wealth pay extra to live near other people… that paints a more complex picture than just “wealth -> privacy”. in my particular peer group also, i witness a trend of 1: shared dorm. 2: private apartment. 3: group house. 4: living with a spouse. that enough people i know who could afford their own house choose to room with others anyway is a personal anecdote that points against a strict “wealth -> privacy” angle.

    i think a certain amount of what you see is a lack of mixing between classes. people tend to select peers who have similar levels of wealth as them (witnessed e.g. by poor people congregating in poor neighborhoods, wealthy people congregating in lakeside neighborhoods). given a power-law shape of wealth, the wealthier you are the less likely your commons will coincide with the commons of some member of society selected at random. in that sense, you may perceive yourself as having more privacy from the eyes of the masses. in the other sense, a smaller crowd with which to blend into makes for less privacy: anyone can track the movements of those who take “private” jets: yet an “everyday person” can easily take a bus anywhere without anyone having knowledge of their whereabouts.

    if i were pressured to provide a definition of wealth, i might say that wealth is some form of durable power. sometimes that manifests as power over nature: in the extreme, an underground shelter with a food stockpile, completely isolated from any societal form of wealth. other forms of wealth can be a power entangled in society: your notional ownership of a (piece of a) corporate entity. from the perspective of a state, any durable economic system it presides over may be wealth. in all these cases, wealth acts as some insulation against the immediate demands of nature, in a broad sense of the word. that’s similar — but not identical — to saying that wealth allows one to focus on or center their life on a greater time horizon. the difference is most notable and the concept most challenged when confronting the end of a fixed lifespan, say, some terminal diagnosis. i would strive to define wealth such that it still has worth even near the end.

    • @roastpotatothiefOP
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      10 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.