If delivering a package isn’t “creating wealth”, then why is digging a ditch, and laying a pipe that delivers water to a building? You’re not creating wealth, you’re just moving water from one place to another! And the customer gets that water and dumps it right back into the sewers.
Except running water is pretty nice. Getting the water you need by turning on a tap instead of hiking to the stream and filling a jug is wealth, especially if you live in a city where hundreds of thousands of other people would be trying to fill their jugs from the same stream. Getting a package tomorrow instead of months from now is wealth. Looking up the answer on the internet in 30 seconds instead of taking hours to drive to the library and look it up in a book is wealth.
I’m an artist. I take some strips of wood, some canvas and paint . . . or sometimes an image I’ve captured with my camera . . . and create something that people can enjoy for generations.
I am not an economist, but as I understand it, economists distinguish between wealth (useful resources or physical posessions) and value. A person may have a job providing value (e.g. doing someone else’s taxes, piloting a plane, or providing legal representation) without directly creating wealth. If you are creating wealth, then you are creating a resource that can provide value. Generally speaking, this means physical things like infrastructure and manufactured goods, but also non-physical things like knowledge transfer, i.e. you educate someone and now that person is a valuable resource for the labor market.
@Machine Elf: Thanks. I understand the difference. Essentially economic wealth has ongoing return whereas economic value is consumed in the using. In the modern world both are essentially 100% man-made. Absent a mine, gold in the ground is not really wealth. It is an ingredient that could become wealth when transformed by human effort.
I was wondering what the OP thought. His examples were collectively incoherent.
In the forestry/logging industry we create a lot of wealth but very little value. It takes a whole lot of other people to realize the potential for all that wealth.
My husband and I have an audio equipment company. We literally stuff through-hole boards by hand, solder them, etc. We call it “artisanal electronics” as a sort of joke, but we’re most definitely making things people want.
I make novels. They might add value to the readers’ lives; with any luck they will en-wealth-ify myself, my agent, and my publisher, when I land one.
Something with no value nor any potential value is, to be certain, not wealth. Though, if someone spent money for something, then presumably they felt that it had value and if there’s more than just that one person, then it would seem that there’s a market for that thing - implying real world value. Your opinion of what has value isn’t the deciding factor. I might buy the old textbooks, for example, in order to recycle them for paper. As such, they presented a wealth both for the original owner and myself.
Twitter generates wealth. It allows people to stay informed, so that they can make rational actions. It reduces the cost of attaining and filtering information from previous technologies like newspapers and books.
And cost reduction is, effectively, the same thing as wealth generation. If I can get gigabytes of information for a few dollars every month where, 100 years ago, I could only get a few kilobytes worth of information over the span of my whole life, at a sizable expense, then clearly my wealth is greater. I have more information and more money than I would have had previously.
That’s interesting. I guess it makes sense that anyone with a sufficiently high opinion of their own work could conclude that other types of work aren’t real work. I work in tech, but in a specialty and geographic region where we don’t really get as big headed about the sort of contribution we’re making. Then in my personal life I know a lot of blue collar people, a slim minority of whom feel that way about their work.
One area where I do see similar attitudes in some people is any time they happen to be in a line position vs staff position. I’ve done and currently do freelance work that’s almost identical to my full time job. It makes me really appreciate the value account executives and project managers bring to the table. Still, I can see how people with a narrower perspective or less experience can easily get confused about the fact that their time is the only time that’s literally bringing in revenue.
No wealth creation here. My company would likely prefer to keep the wealth they give me, if it wasn’t for the government forcing them to create my job.
