can we all be rich?

[John_Mace]

@solkoe

By my reasoning, wealth based on fossil fuels is artificial because a) an industrialized society could not exist without it b) it is not a resource like gold that stays around after you mine it, it gets burned. Gold can be passed down from one king to another. On of the reasons there is conflict in the middle east is that the younger generation is seeing their future wealth go up in smoke.

I still think you’re mistaken. Imagine how much more gold there is in the world today because we use machines (powered by fossil fuels) to mine it instead of digging with shovels. We almost certainly wouldn’t have invented photovoltaic cells without using fossil fuels.

[msmith537]

@solkoe

By my reasoning, wealth based on fossil fuels is artificial because a) an industrialized society could not exist without it b) it is not a resource like gold that stays around after you mine it, it gets burned. Gold can be passed down from one king to another. On of the reasons there is conflict in the middle east is that the younger generation is seeing their future wealth go up in smoke.

Your reasoning is flawed. Gold has little or no intrinsic value. You can’t eat it. You can’t build with it. You can’t use it to power anything. Gold only has value in it’s use as a medium of exchange (and for making jewelry and speaker cable). It’s like saying a nation is wealthy because it can print a lot of money.

A nations wealth is based on its natural resources (wood, oil, minerals, farmland, intellectual capital, etc) and it’s ability to add value to those resources by converting them into usable products (manufacturing, agriculture, etc). A nations wealth is not “artificial” when those resources are non-renewable, however it can squander that wealth.

As to the question of “can we all be rich?”, the answer is no. There are not enough resources for 6 billion people to live like billionares.

Can we all live a Western middle-American lifestyle with a house, car for each adult, plenty of food, electricity, phone and Internet? Maybe. It’s an issue of resource availability and distribution. The big question is will there be enough resources to produce the energy required for the world to maintain that lifestyle?

[mazinger_z]

Wesley Clark said it best. Do not think of “wealth” in nominal amounts. In other words, it’s not about the money. It never is in economics. It’s about all about VALUE. However, to offset the myriad of issues found in Agnostic Pagan’s view of economics, economists define value according to a numerical amount, in this case, the almighty dollar. The corresponding dollar amount really only measure relativity, even in when such statistics and/or data are presented in absolute terms (in which case, it will be absolute to zero (0) or nothing.)

Therefore, to answer the OP’s question: can we all be rich? The answer is not defineable, or more simply, no. Someone will always be more relatively wealthy than someone else, only because we are humans, and we place intrinsic values on goods and services as a society, and because we have limited resources or perceive limits that drives the values we place on goods and services.

The question, whenever I see these threads, should always be addressed as: “Can we all have the same level of living?” The answer, I believe, is undoubtedly yes (barring any ecological disaster, including uncontrollable population boom – though some economists think that that is a good thing). Would we all be rich? Even using the most common definition of the word, and even assuming we were all culturally assimilated, under one world government, the answer will always be no. For some reason or another, society will place value on someone or something’s characteristics or abilities or properties (“resources”), and the person in control of that resource shall be considered to be more valuable, or more wealthy.

Are we more wealthy since 100 years ago? Undoubtedly yes, through any type of measurement you can think of. All economists, from the most liberal to the most conservative will agree that through technological innovation, we are more wealthy (i.e. we all have more value). What was the literacy rate 100 years ago? How many people were living in huts? What was the access to health care? What was the average life span? Brad J. Delong has a study on this somewhere where he put values and calculates rates of the universally held GDP across the years.

[Thrasymachus]

@Brain Wreck

If somebody invented a magic box that would produce anything anybody wanted, there wouldn’t be enough space to absorb the stuff or the inevitable population explosion. We’d soon fill the planet with ourselves, our buildings, our waste. I’d expect a future of unending territorial wars until everyone died or all the magic boxes were destroyed. So yes, I think is a limit to the size of the stable above-substistence-level population of earth.

I’ve often thought about this scenario - what if manufacturing improves to the ultimate conceivable level, and interestingly enough I’ve reached the opposite conclusion about the results on humanity.

My thinking is that people value scarcity, so that although currently status seems to be measured in “stuff”, when stuff is so plentiful as to be not worth a second glance, then some new motivation or status symbol will take over - like relationships or beauty. Perhaps some religion of austerity would pop up? The law of diminishing returns must kick in sometime - we only have 24 hours a day and one stomach, one mind each.

Of course, the first time someone asks for a FTL spaceship from the magic box, all bets are off…