
A Giant Asteroid of Gold Won’t Make Us Richer - pseudolus
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-07-08/asteroid-16-psyche-and-all-that-gold-won-t-make-earth-richer
======
Animats
Hey, at least we could fix soldering. 80% gold, 20% tin is the best solder.[1]
Very strong, no whisker growth. Often used inside ICs, and for some avionics
boards.

[1] [https://www.palomartechnologies.com/blog/why-gold-tin-is-
the...](https://www.palomartechnologies.com/blog/why-gold-tin-is-the-best-
solder-alloy)

~~~
imtringued
I'm sure we could come up with a lot of use cases for abundant gold. The idea
that cost effectively extracting resources from space does not make humanity
richer is incredibly backwards. Extracting more resources, using those
resources more efficiently and offering more services is absolutely necessary
to increase our economic productivity and therefore grow our economy.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Only if it's a net gain in resources. There is currently a massive cost in
resources and pollution for everything put into, or retrieved from, space.
Hopefully that will change, though I doubt it'll ever reach 1-to-1.

~~~
jacobush
It has potential to go off the charts.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Does it really though?

I'm not a physicist yet without something like fusion as a miniaturized
propellant I don't see how it can ever be wiser to mine asteroids than try to
live more sustainably on Earth first.

~~~
ben_w
Space economics is… counterintuitive. A while ago I read a blog ranting about
how pointless it was to mine He3 from the moon for fusion. A brief summary:

* We don’t have fusion reactors

* If we did, we could mine fuel from the gas giants’ atmospheres

* He3 is so poorly concentrated in the Lunar regolith that the easy way to extract it also produces high purity silicon and oxygen

* Turning that silicon into ingots and firing them at the Earth, you can generate more power from electromagnetically decelerating them then you would get from the fusion of the helium, and this is a perfectly sensible way to generate power because of the relative depth of the Earth and Moon gravity wells

* You can then burn the silicon instead of coal, and this is absolutely fine because the ash is sand instead of a greenhouse gas. You can also bring oxygen from the Moon to burn it with so you won’t run out of oxygen on Earth to breathe.

Unfortunately I can’t find the post whenever I’ve tried searching for it.

------
pseudolus
I think the author is overlooking the environmental aspect of mining asteroids
for minerals. Currently huge levels of environmental damage are caused by
mining for gold, platinum and other metals. To the extent that these mining
activities can be moved "off earth" our planet's environment would benefit
enormously. In this regard, a giant asteroid of gold would make us richer.

~~~
clhodapp
Maybe. Putting things into space creates a lot of air pollution.

~~~
makerofspoons
You could launch 3 Big Falcon Rockets per day for a year and only then equal
the emissions for all the air traffic at Heathrow that occurs in a month:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/8g0iaj/bfr_ai...](https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/8g0iaj/bfr_air_pollution/dz6uz6q?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x)

There are bigger fish to fry in terms of the environment.

~~~
jankotek
Those launches would only put a few thousand tons on orbit, that is nothing
for mining operation.

~~~
headcanon
Getting large-scale mining operations in space, or any kind of industrial base
for that matter, would require us to start fabricating things in space.

Getting something in orbit will always be expensive and prohibitive, even when
space elevators are built, so there will be enough incentive to start building
things in space.

~~~
moneytide1
I've wondered how interstellar smelting would work. There would need to be
centripetal force on the foundry station to keep metals flowing. Nearby ice
could provide hydrogen and oxygen for propulsion and even heat for steam
turbine electricity for the plant. Certainly there would be uranium present as
well so fission would be an option, albeit more complicated.

Four/eight year military service spent policing/polluting the world could be
replaced by short "tours" in asteroid belt operations.

The key to all of this would be constant launches and flow of material/labor,
ideally with international cooperation. The high frequency of launches in
itself is a safety feature - stranded crews would be able to expect fly-bys.

It would be expensive at first because we would essentially be ejecting many
resources away from the planet. But the promise of heavy-industry eventually
zoned outside of our natural atmosphere could be the [non-classical]
incentive.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Rotation might be done with magnetic fields instead of ejecting ionized gas
(water etc). And dirty fission power is very practical in space, where the
inverse-square law can make it quite harmless.

~~~
moneytide1
Would the magnetic field be provided by an auxiliary station adjacent to the
rotating foundry? Or could the structure propel it's own smelting vats somehow
via the field on arms attached to a central bearing?

It would seem more efficient with a field rather than constantly ejecting
usable material.

How is the inverse squared law applied to space fission? Ease of cooling?

~~~
ben_w
> How is the inverse squared law applied to space fission? Ease of cooling?

If you double the distance, the radiation hazard reduces by a factor of four.
This is why the Sun — an unshielded fusion reactor — hasn’t already killed
everyone.

------
mcv
While the asteroid will of course never be worth the quintillions it's worth
on paper, there's no doubt it will be worth something. Otherwise, why are
people still spending money to dig up gold out of the earth?

But gold isn't that interesting. The only reason it's valued the way it is, is
because everybody has agreed it's valuable. But there are many other rare
metals and minerals we can mine from asteroids that would be immensely useful.
In smartphones and other electronics, for example.

At the moment, rare earth elements are often mined in terrible destructive
ways, sometimes under atrocious circumstances. Fairphone is the one phone
company that's trying to do something about it, but on their own, they're not
going to have a lot of impact. Off-world mining would allow us to leave our
Earth intact while still enjoying the smartphones and other electronics that
these materials enable.

~~~
DonHopkins
What's much more valuable than the gold is the infrastructure required to
bring that gold back to earth.

Harvesting sand and helium from space might be more valuable than gold.

~~~
tshannon
The sand comment had me perplexed, until I did some googling:

[https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces-
global-...](https://www.npr.org/2017/07/21/538472671/world-faces-global-sand-
shortage)

~~~
DonHopkins
Apparently desert sand is no good for making concrete, because it's been
smoothed and rounded by the wind. I'm guessing moon sand wouldn't have such a
problem. Although you'd have to solve the problem of re-entry into the Earth's
atmosphere. How practical are space elevators?

------
scotty79
> The metal would have various industrial applications and make nice jewelry
> and dental fillings, but it wouldn’t spark a new industrial revolution, or
> dramatically bring down the cost of goods and services, or in general make
> human life much better or more comfortable.

There would be many new industrial aplications for gold alloys. I think
abundance of gold could spark mini industrial revolution.

~~~
cogman10
Seems a pretty big assumption. We have an abundance of silicon, that hasn't
sparked any sort of revolution around silicon.

Gold has some nice properties, but I don't think it is a wonder metal.

~~~
klodolph
> We have an abundance of silicon, that hasn't sparked any sort of revolution
> around silicon.

...But it has? Think of all the things we make out of silicon and silicon
compounds. Buildings, glass, countertops, tools, computers, etc...

If silicon were rarer we would surely not be making buildings and windows out
of silicon compounds! Some of these do not have easy replacements. You can
make buildings without silicon (many are made without) but without silicon we
would have a hard time coming up with something like glass. Glass fueled a lot
of our scientific revolutions, giving us glassware for chemistry, optics for
microscopes and telescopes, etc.

Who can know how long it might have taken for us to discover the theory of
gravity, cell theory, germ theory, or large chunks of chemistry without glass.

~~~
perl4ever
Another case in point, maybe a better parallel, is aluminum. Once it was more
precious than gold and used in similar applications to gold and platinum. Then
technology was developed to produce it more easily, and we started making
things like wheels and then entire vehicles out of it.

So we already have the precedent of a precious metal becoming an industrial
one, although I don't mean to suggest gold alloys would be good for the same
applications due to its density.

~~~
cogman10
The strength to weight ratio of aluminum was known long before we could mass
produce it.

For example, Titanium is superior to aluminum in most weight/strength
applications. If we could mass produce it, we'd not use aluminum anymore.

Carbon fiber is even better than Titanium. Again, if it were mass producible,
we'd use it for everything.

I can point to materials that, if they were cheaper, we'd make everything out
of them. That's because we've researched these materials and know that they
have potential applications. Their availability hasn't been a factor in the
research, not really.

Gold, AFAIK, doesn't have those same sorts of analogous usages. It doesn't
have a "But if it were cheaper" sort of application. Maybe some electronics or
nano-scale applications might benefit from it, but I wouldn't think it would
be excluded from that research since you are talking about a tiny amount per
component (after all, we still use gold to plate electronic leads today).

~~~
dredmorbius
Titanium is strong but brittle, and carbon fibre (or the epoxy which bonds it)
has problems at high temperatures. Even aluminium has challenges compared to
steel of fatigue under stress or tension, being attacked by certain substances
(especially mercury), of a lower melting point, and of bimetallic corrosion
(when paired with copper wire in electrical applications: don't do that).

Abundance matters (iron, steel), ore processing (electricity and baauxite),
but so too do material properties.

------
timemct
Bringing down precious metals to Earth isn't the main point of developing
space mining tech, e.g. mining a golden asteroid. The mined materials would be
useful for bootstrapping other space based projects. With the right mining
tech in place, it would be better to build anything that's going to be
strictly used in space, well, in space. Earth's gravity well is much less of a
cost factor if you don't have to send up manufactured items.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Yes indeed. I can’t help from thinking about the Belters in the sci-fi show
The Expanse.

------
radford-neal
The article's reasoning is mistaken. Nobody knows whether or not reducing the
price of gold to $1/ounce would make us much richer or not - because nobody is
currently spending serious time thinking of what one could do if gold cost
$1/ounce.

------
moneytide1
We should be more concerned with platinum-group elements on asteroids
(ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, osmium, iridium, platinum).

We've had to allocate agile scientific minds to reduce the use of expensive
platinum-group metals in fuel cells in order to make them cost effective:

[https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-12-scientist...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/phys.org/news/2018-12-scientists-
maximize-effectiveness-platinum-fuel.amp)

------
scythe
There’s loads of palladium, molybdenum and ruthenium in asteroids. Gold is
much rarer. (Even-numbered elements are more common than odd-numbered elements
on a celestial scale.) Pd, Ru and Mo are very useful in chemistry and industry
— alloys containing less than 1% Mo go for a premium due to their improved
durability. Pd is the _king_ of catalysts. Among other things, it’s key to
fuel cells and catalytic converters. Ru is a little less interesting, but it
does improve (even more than normal) corrosion resistance in Ti and support
extremely-high-temperature nickel superalloys, as might be used for e.g.
exploring Venus.

------
beefield
Just wondering which central bank is the first to conclude that it actually is
useless and stupid to keep gold reserves and decides to dump their gold to the
market first. After which, obviously, we see a crash in gold price rarely seen
in the world history. And actually start doing something useful with the
unique yellow metal that we collectively have decided that is better to be
hidden and not used...

~~~
Animats
There was talk of that in the early 2000s. There's a lobby against that, the
"World Gold Council".

------
JoeAltmaier
Never mind what it's all worth. How can we get it where we can use it?

We're talking billions of miles away, with astonishing temperature variations
and nearly pure vacuum. Spare parts are months/years away.

Then, it takes tremendous energy to mine/smelt. And tremendous pressures. How
do you grapple with an asteroid in weightless conditions, to apply a drill to
the surface? What do you hold onto? How do you generate the torque to turn the
drill? Not from some kW power source such as used in existing satellites and
probes. We're talking MW/GW power sources needed.

Then, drilling produces dust/grit by the ton. Where will it go? Just blow it
away? There's no atmosphere to vent dust. It'll all just cling, hover and
generally be in the way. Building up continuously as you drill.

There are 1000 such problems to be solved before we ever see the first ounce
of gold (or whatever) from an asteroid.

~~~
aeternus
Interestingly, this is the mechanism by which the Astroid may actually make
all of us richer.

It will require inventions and new technologies to successfully mine the
asteroid, and those will give society access to vast new resources.

------
JumpCrisscross
Hmm, what is an element it found in vast quantities in accessible asteroids
_would_ spawn a fundamental transformation? Platinum group metals? Uranium?
Phorphorus? Rare earths?

~~~
wongarsu
Both silver and gold would be pretty good candidates for unlocking some great
upgrades to both industrial and everyday items (silver is the most conductive
metal, gold is an excellent conductor that's virtually rust free).

Lithium and cobalt are a major cost for Li-Ion batteries, tanking their price
could transform the world with cheap(er) energy storage.

~~~
cogman10
Gold is an OK conductor, but aluminum is nearly as good while being much
lighter. Corrosion isn't really a problem for it either. (Aluminum corrodes
very quickly, but that doesn't impact it's conductivity or strength)

~~~
scentoni
Aluminum does have safety issues in household wiring:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminum_building_wiring)

------
phkahler
Best way to use asteroid resources: crash them into Mars now, while there is
no hazard to humans. Then when people go there they'll have lots or useful raw
material near the surface. ;-)

~~~
jacobush
Hey, and the moon! The moon has lower gravity and we can more easily go pick
it up there

------
leib
Surely lowering the price of precious material will make everyone better off,
they'll just stay the same relative to each other?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Surely lowering the price of precious material will make everyone better
> off, they'll just stay the same relative to each other?

They won't stay the same relative to each other if anyone's current wealth is
more related to the scarcity of the precious material in question than anyone
else, which is guaranteed to be the case for any precious material.

~~~
tomatotomato37
That only really applies to prestige uses; to go with the De Beer analogy a
500 carat "jewel" diamond goes for $50 million, yet some researcher needing an
artificial diamond optic lens the size of a dinner plate can get one made for
just a couple million.

~~~
dragonwriter
That's a special effect of the diamond marketplace where diamonds aren't
really “precious materials” but _authenticatable natural_ diamonds are
precious _collectibles_. (That is, it is the provenance and not the material
that is precious.).

But the dynamics are the same so long as the supply glut is in things
interchangeable with what is precious (e.g., diamonds that, down to the De
Beers microetching, are indistinguishable from the ones that people place
value on.)

------
woodandsteel
This has some good explanations of basic economics.

However, the real importance of mining asteroids is that it would make it
possible to build colonies in space that could potentially hold far more than
the present population of Earth.

~~~
jbattle
Gold is quite dense, I wonder if you could use this asteroid to build
shielding for long-term habitats. I imagine you'd still need something
stronger to provide the structural elements, but for managing radiation aboard
space stations this gold might be quite useful

~~~
dredmorbius
Bulk rock or regolith is vastly more abundant and works well.

See O'Neill's original designs.

------
mc32
How would this get divvied up? Someone corrals this thing, tows it into some
kind of earth orbit, then auctions it off by the ton. How do they get it to
the customer? Re-entry vehicle or something else like shielding ton ingots in
special thermal tiles and have it crash into deserts somewhere?

Imagine if copper wire were replaced with cheaper gold wire?

~~~
paxys
Hilarious (and a bit scary) to think that in the near future a random company
could haul a massive gold asteroid to Earth and completely destroy the global
economy.

~~~
pitaj
Why would it destroy the economy?

~~~
npongratz
Probably similar to how the Spanish conquistador's precious metals haul from
the New World decimated the economy of Spain: massive supply/demand imbalance.

~~~
RaptorJ
A better analogy would be if they towed back an asteroid full of $100 bills.

~~~
perl4ever
"Now if they find an asteroid that is made out of Bitcoin, that will be
economically significant." -Matt Levine

------
colechristensen
The author is missing the point that many expensive things are expensive
because they are rare AND useful.

The wealth comes from prices going down for useful things and new things
becoming possible as a result of the lowered costs.

How much of battery costs are the metals? What about rare earths used in
electronics? What compromises are made to save costs?

------
fitzroy
Clearly the author has never had to arm a population with glitterguns against
an impending Cyberman attack.

------
LinuxBender
Learning how to mine asteroids could increase the likelihood that we would
have the technology to push dangerous asteroids out of earths path.

~~~
melling
It will likely increase technology on many levels.

The technical challenges and competition will change everything. Maybe some
scientific platforms could hitch a ride at a heavily discounted price, for
example?

~~~
LinuxBender
Agreed. I could imagine Darpa funding projects around this for defense and
scientific goals.

------
headcanon
This would have very interesting market dynamics that the article touches on a
little bit. In order to actually make use of the gold, you have to build some
sort of industrial base in orbit. So while the total pool of gold within
humanity's grasp would increase substantially, the availability would not
necessarily increase in the same way.

If I buy gold in a commodities market, it is kept in a holding area and rarely
moved, but I can for a fee have that gold shipped to me if I really wanted to.
Since there is not a substantial price difference in shipping gold to one
place vs another on Earth (within the same order of magnitude at least), it
doesn't really matter "who" I buy the gold from, so for purely terrestrial
markets, gold is gold.

But space-based gold would be much more expensive to ship back to Earth, even
if gravity is generally on our side in that case, since you are subsidizing
the infrastructure required to make that happen. And this probably wouldn't
happen that much anyway, since the space-based gold would likely be kept in
space to build more space-based infrastructure.

So would that create 2 different prices for gold? Or would space-based gold be
much cheaper than terrestrial gold, offset by some coefficient that would be
its relative movement cost between realms?

I am by no means an economics expert, I'm just musing. I believe I'm
essentially talking about arbitrage, but need to refresh my memory on this.

~~~
dmurray
There are already different prices for gold in Zurich, London, New York, Tokyo
and Hong Kong, the five main locations where gold is traded electronically.
There are brokers who will arrange the trade for you to buy gold in one and
sell in the other, at the current "loco swap" price.

If that price moves further from zero than the cost of insuring and
transporting gold bars with a company like Brinks, then someone does step in
and complete the arbitrage.

If I remember right, the prices don't typically move more than about a dollar
an ounce from zero, except for Tokyo where the purity rules are different so
there is an extra step involved in melting down the bars and getting them
restamped.

If there was some demand for holding gold in space, I'd expect roughly the
same economics to apply.

------
drtillberg
Ok, so the PhDs at Bloomberg tell their readership not to fund this boondoggle
of a space adventure, but instead to ... buy up stock certificates with debt
instruments or some such ....

But Wall Street and the Fed (Bloomberg's audience) basically fund every
moonshot these days (directly or indirectly) and either they or Congress get
into an asteroid race, spends millions/billions/trillions of dollars but fail
to recover any more marketable quantities of physical gold for Earth's surface
than would an expedition to the center of the Earth (where there's also gold!)
... and instead sell certificates representing ownership shares of the
asteroid, which initially trade at pairity with physical Earth-surface metal,
but as it becomes clearer that this is an IOU nothing printed based on the
most optimistic projections of what is contained in the space rock (and then
there are the competing claims of multiple expeditions!), the paper declines
precipitously in value and once again demonstrates that economic theory is
fine and good, but unmoored from the discipline provided by tangible backing
of gold, oil, or whatever, a system of currency and credit like ours
predicably generates worthless pieces of paper from huge misallocations of
resources and waste.

~~~
MRD85
How could someone sell shares in an asteroid? Wouldn't it be shares in a
mining operation? If another country or business finds a way to mine that
asteroid then they won't care about your paper claiming ownership.

------
fxj
It is quite expensive to send material to an orbit around earth. A quick
search says $22.000 per kilo. The price of gold per kilo is about $45.000. So
wouldnt it make more sense to keep the gold in the orbit and use it to build
things in space? Also the potential energy of the gold has to go somewhere
when it enters the earth's atmosphere resulting in additional warming.

~~~
cma
> Also the potential energy of the gold has to go somewhere when it enters the
> earth's atmosphere resulting in additional warming.

That would get quickly radiated away. There would be some tiny increase if you
had a sustained amount of it constantly coming in.

~~~
fxj
Why should it be quickly radiated away? What makes the heat different from the
energy that is already stored in the atmosphere? In total it would be the
energy of a large asteroid being smashed on earth. (energy conservation)

------
kristianp
According to wikipedia, it's compsition is mostly Iron and Nickel. Gold would
only be a trace. Iron and Nickel at 1/10th the current cost would have a big
economic impact.

Lower prices for resources would make us richer in spending power.

An asteroid miner, just like a Bhp or Mincore, would have to take into account
the effect on market prices of a large new supply.

Mass of (2.41±0.32)×10^19 kg

~~~
aaronblohowiak
A ton of iron scrap is about $160, if my math is right. A ton of iron ore is
$70. I do not believe that reducing that price to 1/10th of present would be
huge — most of the cost now IIUC is in processing.

------
magicnubs
> Rejoice, people of Earth! News outlets are reporting that NASA is planning
> to visit an asteroid made of gold and other precious metals! At current
> prices, the minerals contained in asteroid 16 Psyche are said to be worth
> $700 quintillion -- enough to give everyone on the planet $93 billion. We’re
> all going to be richer than Jeff Bezos!

No one ever thought it was going to work this way.

~~~
umvi
> enough to give everyone on the planet $93 billion

In the words of Syndrome: "When everyone's super... no one will be" Poverty is
relative wealth, so if everyone's wealth increased by the same amount, the
poverty line would be exactly the same.

If you gave everyone on earth 1kg of gold simultaneously, it would actually
make the poor poorer since it would devalue any of their current golden
possessions to near zero.

~~~
ggggtez
>it would actually make the poor poorer

Nope. This is entirely wrong.

Consider: You have $100. I have $1000. We both get +$50 worth of gold. So you
have $150 and I have $1050. You increased your welth by 50%, but I only
increased my wealth by 5%. So yes, if you had no money, you actually _did_
earn purchasing power.

Let's consider another example: The poor person probably has $0 invested in
gold. So if anything, it hurts people in the middle class, who might have
let's say 5% of their wealth in gold, which is suddenly worthless. So the poor
person has actually increased their buying power compared to the middle class,
and the rich (who probably have so much money in real-estate and stocks that
any gold investment is minuscule) are unaffected.

~~~
jbattle
Ah, but who would pay you $50 for that gold?

------
mrfusion
I’m not sure why it’s focusing on gold. It’s a bit of a straw man argument
using gold to argue against astroid mining.

There are plenty of precious metals that have abundant industrial uses.

------
aussieguy1234
The world is much better off without gold mining on earth. Not just for the
environment but for the exploited miners as well, including children.

The Children Risking Their Lives In Underwater Gold Mines ...
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1L_pxYZVwE](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P1L_pxYZVwE)

------
8bitsrule
My guess is that few of us will live to see the evidence-based spreadsheet on
this fictional venture. No doubt it would prove to be 'gold' to several earth-
based corporations ... if only the _desire_ could be _whipped up_ to get the
public to fall for it.

------
mankeysee
They'd probably keep it a secret if they manage to succeed (and slowly dole it
out as per need and sell it at high present costs); of course unless a rival
manages to do so as well and threatens "publicizing" the fact.

edit: The article does seem to cover this situation kind of.

------
melq
How much metal will they realistically be able to bring back from an asteroid?
I don't know anything about this but it seems improbable that we'd go from
being able to bring home a few moon rocks right to 700 quintillion dollars
worth of gold.

~~~
perl4ever
Quote:

"There is a lot of gold right here on Earth that has not been dug up! Because
it is pretty deep underground or whatever. The relevant supply of gold is the
stuff that can be extracted economically, not just the stuff that exists. The
same thing is even more true hundreds of millions of miles away in outer
space. You cannot just send a big dump truck to Psyche 16, shovel some loose
gold nuggets into it, and drive it back to your house."

------
westurner
> _this example shows that real wealth doesn’t actually come from golden
> hoards. It comes from the productive activities of human beings creating
> things that other human beings desire._

Value, Price, and Wealth

~~~
dredmorbius
???

I'd suggest a different triad: cost, price, value.

[https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/48rd02/cost_va...](https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/48rd02/cost_value_price_money_and_emergy_developing/)

~~~
westurner
Good call. I don't know where I was going with that. Cost, price, value, and
wealth.

Are there better examples for illustrating the differences between these kind
of distinct terms?

Less convertible collectibles like coins and baseball cards (that require
energy for exchange) have (over time t): costs of production, marketing, and
distribution; retail sales price; market price; and 'value' which is abstract
relative (opportunity cost in terms of fiat currency (which is somehow
distinct from price at time t (possibly due to 'speculative information')))

Wealth comes from relationships, margins between costs and prices, long term
planning, […]

~~~
dredmorbius
_Are there better examples for illustrating the differences between these kind
of distinct terms?_

For concepts as intrinsically fundamental to economics as these are, the
agreement and understanding of what they are, even amomg economists, is
surprisingly poor. It's not even clear whether or not "wealth" refers to a
flow or stock -- Adam Smith uses the term both ways. And much contemporary
mainstream 'wealth creation" discussion addresses _accounting profit_ rather
than _economic wealth_. Or broader terms such aas _ecological wealth_ (or
natural capital). There's some progress, and Steve Keen has been synthesizing
much of it recently, but the terms fare poorly.

A key issue is that "price‘ and "exchange value" are ofteen conflated,
creating confusiin with use/ownership value.

Addressing your terms, "cost" and "price", and typically "value", indicate
some metric of _exchange_ or _opportunity cost_ (or benefit). Whilst "wealth",
as typically used, tends to relate to some _store_ or _accumulation_. In
electrical terms (a potentially, so to speak, useful analogue) the difference
between voltage and charge, with current representing some other property,
possibly material flows of goods or energy.

The whole question of _media for exchange_ (currency, and the like), and
_durable forms of financial wealth_ (land, art, collectibles) is another
interesting one, with discussionnby Ricardo and Jevons quite interesting --
both useful and flawed.

And don't even get me started on the near total discounting of accumulated
natural capital, say, the 100-300 million year factor of time embodied in
fossil fuels. The reasons and rationales for excluding that being fascinating
(Ricardo, Tolstoy, Gray, Hotelling, Boulding, Soddy, Georgescu-Roegen, Daly,
Keen).

You are correct that all value (and hence wealth) is relative, and hence
relational.

TL;DR: Not that I'm aware.

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yayitswei
Reminds me of pg's essay on wealth:
[http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html](http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html)

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sixtypoundhound
Water and industrial raw materials at the top of the gravity well, on the
other hand.... would be a massive win....

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neonate
[http://archive.is/s74k0](http://archive.is/s74k0)

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sgt101
yus, but a lakeful of helium would.

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HocusLocus
But things would shore get purdy!

