>I think wealth should be measured by how many hours at the median wage do you need to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living.
That's a weird definition of "wealth". Wealth is generally understood to mean how much assets you have accumulated, not your free cash flow. What you're describing is properly referred to as discretionary income.
It's a real problem that you absolutely have to have money for living (food, housing, healthcare), but it's the same money you use to buy computer games or supercars.
If that's the case, everyone in postwar Germany or modern Zimbabwe should be the wealthiest people to ever exist and therefore have the highest quality of life.
There's a lot more to it than how many beans you have in the bank.
>If that's the case, everyone in postwar Germany or modern Zimbabwe should be the wealthiest people to ever exist and therefore have the highest quality of life.
If you're trying to imply that wealth = number in your bank account and 10x inflation makes you 10x wealthier, that's a massive misunderstanding of what "how much assets you have accumulated". Even though it wasn't explicitly stated, it's generally understood that the assets are valued in some meaningful way (eg. CPI or GDP deflator), rather than just looking at the raw numbers in your bank account.
> Wealth is generally understood to mean how much assets you have accumulated
...by accountants.
"Wealth" as used by most people is related to quality of life. It even shows up in the phrase "house poor" where maybe someone has great net assets but cannot live comfortable life due to the drain of the house. Wealth is not money.
"House poor" is an oxymoron. They have the option at any time to sell their house to get liquid. I can have ten gold bars and choose to live like a miser because I don't want to touch my gold, but everybody would call that ridiculous. Just as ridiculous are "house poor" who don't want to touch their real estate wealth. But we can't say that, because everybody reading this has relatives who are "house poor", and we all have to work together to keep up the lie.
Life is composed of many factors of which one is carbon, but you need carbon to have life.
There, carbon is life.
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No, life is the combination of carbon and other things, so wealth is the combination of money and other things. It's the combination and interaction with other things that is important and focussing just on money is missing the forest for the trees.
>I think wealth should be measured by how many hours at the median wage do you need to achieve a socially acceptable standard of living.
That's a weird definition of "wealth". Wealth is generally understood to mean how much assets you have accumulated, not your free cash flow. What you're describing is properly referred to as discretionary income.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_income#Discretionar...