What is the worth of all the goods that have been produced in the US that are still standing? All the buildings, all the cars, all the consumer items, infrastructure, etc? I"d assume at least $100 trillion.
What is the value of all the natural resources we currently have in this country.
I’m assuming these questions are hard to answer because for question 1, do you include services or just goods that have been produced? For question 2, certain natural resources (like farmland) can produce goods that have value year after year. But I guess I"m asking what is the value of all the goods that humans have produced, and what is the value of all the raw materials we have?
Example, the US has about 260 billion tons of coal, a ton of coal is worth $52, so the US has about 13 trillion dollars worth of coal alone.
The standard response to questions like these is that they can’t be answered. “Can’t” has a specific meaning here. Many immensely valuable things are not up for sale and will never have a price tag. What is the value of the White House? Or Yellowstone National Park? Other objects have value because they are rare or hard to obtain. Does the value of a diamond or a ton of coal hold up if all of it goes on the market at once? Multiplying the value of a ton of coal by all the tons of coal known in reserve today is like dividing by zero: the result is literally meaningless because it all the coal in the ground is not a simple multiplier of the coal that’s been dug up. Services are another sinkhole. The value of what stay-at-home mothers and housewives contribute to the economy has been debated for decades. The answers range from zero to trillions.
The uncertainly you have about what to include is probably because you aren’t sure why you’re asking the question. If you magically got an answer what would you do with it? What truth would it give you? What deeper understanding of the world results? The purpose of a question frames its form and particulars. This one is unanswerably open-minded because it has no end in mind.
To accusations of threadshitting: we’re in GQ. “No factual answer” is a legitimate answer. and the phrase I use when I report a thread to the mods to move it out of GQ.
At a minimum, you’d need to subtract the amount of money needed to extract the coal, and do whatever you have to do to it before you can sell it. No one would buy unextracted resources for their extracted worth, so coal in the ground is not worth the same as coal on the docks ready for sale to China. Plus, if you dumped all that coal on the market at once, you would depress the price. If you spread it out over time, you would have to deal with the fact that you don’t know what coal will be worth 10 years from now.
This same effect is why estimates of the net wort of folks like Bill Gates are not accurate. If he tried to sell all his stock at once, it wouldn’t be worth the existing market value.
The trouble with untapped resources such as mineral deposits is you can never be sure how much is hiding below ground. I don’t think a country as big as the US can be declared “fully explored” by geologists. And what about countries that don’t have exploration? Can they be glossed over as having no mineral wealth?
Which is why economists prefer actual production figures to measure a country’s wealth.