[chowells]

As Led Zeppelin once said, "you know sometimes words have two meanings". That definition of wealth is all well and good for books about how markets are magical fix-everything pixie dust. But it's not the definition of wealth that applies when used to describe a person. A wealthy person is not someone with a lot of things. That's a hoarder. A wealthy person is someone who can use their economic power to shape the world around them.

[chongli]

That definition of wealth is all well and good for books about how markets are magical fix-everything pixie dust

No, it actually means something. We have access to refrigeration, climate control, near-limitless computation, entertainment, transportation, knowledge, communication, and medicine. All of this stuff would BLOW THE MINDS of medieval kings. Even if you're living in a 1BR apartment, working at Walmart and struggling to pay rent, you enjoy many luxuries Charlemagne could scarcely dream of.

Go to the store, grab a pineapple off the shelf, take it home, and eat it. Then read about the great lengths [1] the wealthy people of the past went to in order to try to grow pineapples in Europe, and how obsessed the culture became with this fruit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pineapple_mania

[fragmede]

If you're in that one bedroom, struggling at Walmart, you probably don't have a dishwasher or a washing machine and dryer, and possibly not air conditioning or heating, or at least, your electricity bill is enough that you have to think twice before setting climate control to a comfortable level. Your social life probably isn't anywhere near what Charlemagne had. You have a smartphone and that has brought you news from afar. But that news is terrible! Local politics, things are fucked, climate change is out of control, geopolitics is a whole other shit show. Charlemagne didn't have to deal with Israel and Donald Trump. His world was very different. Sure, I have a fridge and a microwave and can use that to sate my hunger in mere minutes, a luxury inconceivable to Charlemagne, but all the trappings of modern society, with TikTok and Reels hasn't made us globally happier. Seeing the emotional damage from whichever online platform surfaces drone videos out of Ukraine today for me as a form of wealth is one perspective. We've lost the plot, or at least I have. We're solving the problems in front of our faces without asking if that's the right problem to be solved.

[SamPatt]

>A wealthy person is not someone with a lot of things.

No one made that claim.

By nearly any sane metric the world is wealthier. You can verify this on sites like Our World in Data.

We are healthier, have more leisure time, are less likely to die in natural disasters, etc.

It's willful ignorance to define wealth in a way that wouldn't show humanity as having gotten more wealthy. You're doing harm by overlooking massive gains we've made and understanding why we made them and instead redefining the common sense understanding of basic terms.

[burningChrome]

>> By nearly any sane metric the world is wealthier.

I would also point out people living in "poverty" in the US would be considered quite wealthy in other countries like Cuba or Haiti.

Everything is relative to how you define wealth and what you're comparing it to.

[confidantlake]

My father's generation had much more leisure time than my generation. When he was out of the office at 5pm work stopped. There were no laptops, slack pings, etc, etc. Vacations were longer, pensions were a thing. You could get a job supporting a family right out of high school. Things have absolutely gotten worse in the west no matter how much you want to twist the stats.