[sifar]

To explore what wealth is I recommend The Origin Of Wealth by Eric D. Beinhocker.

In essence, wealth is a process that creates low entropy.

He posits three conditions that need to be met:

All value creating economic transformations and transactions

1) Irreversibility - are thermodynamically irreversible

2) Entropy - reduce entropy locally while increasing it globally

3) Fitness - need to be fit for human purposes.

On my recent trip, I saw mountains being broken and shipped off to distant places for construction. If it goes on, within a few decades they will cease to exist. The last one tells us that we can define what wealth means - to some the mountains and the ecosystem they harbour are wealth, to some the buildings and the resulting economic activity is wealth.