Wealth

Wealth usually refers to money and property under the control of a single individual person[?], immediate family[?] or cohesive extended family. The use of the word itself assumes some socially-respected means of identifying funds or lands as "belonging to" someone, i.e. a broadly accepted notion of property and a means of protection of that property that can be invoked with minimal (or, ideally, no) effort and expense on the part of the owner. Concepts of wealth tend to vary drastically among hominid societies.

Anthropology characterizes societies in part due to concepts of wealth and power, which protects wealth by definition:

• Great Apes seem to have notions of "turf" and control of food-gathering[?] ranges, and use limited tools that are typically not improved much, therefore not difficult to simply re-create. They seem also to have little idea of wealth although gorillas seem to have the capacity to recognize and protect pets and children. This seems less an idea of wealth than of family.
• Hominoids including all human ancestors seem to have started with similar limited ideas of wealth, but as tools and clothing and other such mobile infrastructural capital became important to survival especially in hostile biomes, ideas such as the inheritance of wealth, political positions[?] especially of leadership[?], and ability to control group movements to perhaps reinforce such power emerged. Neanderthal societies had elaborate funerary rites and cave painting which implies at least a notion of shared assets that could be spent for social purposes, or preserved for social purposes. Wealth may have been collective.
• Humans back to and including the Cro-Magnons seem to have had clearly defined rulers and status hierarchies. Digs in Russia have revealed elaborate funeral clothing[?] on a pair of children buried there over 35,000 years ago, demonstrating high artisan[?] skill, and the capacity to direct specialized labor[?] to tasks that are not of any utility to the group's survival - sure indicators of a modern idea of wealth.
• Tribal society[?] to the modern era has means of respecting but also moderating the acquistion and use of wealth. Also, slavery and the ownership of other humans began to be quite common. In extremely ecologically rich areas such as those inhabited by the Haida in the Cascadia Pacific East Rim[?] ecoregion, traditions like potlatch kept wealth relatively evenly distributed, requiring leaders to buy continued status and respect with giveaways of wealth to the poorer members of society. Such traditions are echoed by modern philanthropy. Ownership of wealth implied many obligations including care for slaves who were not a separate class or race but people who utimately could be re-integrated - rehabilitation[?]. As such traditions involve trade of tangible assets[?] for intangible assets[?], and make what are today often seen as government resposibilities into matters of personal honour, they are hard to describe other than within a broad theory of political economy, where tradeoffs between means of protection, persuasion and production, and valuations of different styles of capital, are described. In particular, concepts of owning land were and are difficult to characterize in Enlightenment terms, bearing more resemblance to modern ideas of bioregionalism or ecological stewardship[?] or natural capital. Ecological economics continues these traditions.
• Irrigation and urbanization, especially in ancient Sumer and later Egypt, are thought to have triggered a shift that unified the ideas of wealth and control of land and agriculture. Feeding a large stable population was possible and necessary to achieve universal cultivation[?] and city-state protection. The state and familiar notions of war emerged at this time. The tribal cultures were formalized into what we would call feudal systems, and many obligations were assumed by monarchy and related aristocracy. Protection of infrastructural capital built up over generations became critical: city walls, irrigation systems, sewage systems[?], aqueducts, buildings, all impossible to replace within a single generation, and thus a matter of social survival to maintain. The social capital of entire societies was often defined in terms of its relation to infrastructural capital, e.g. castles or forts or an allied monastery, cathedral or temple, and natural capital, i.e. the land that supplied locally grown food[?]. Agricultural economics[?] continues these traditions and analyses of modern agricultural policy and related ideas of wealth, e.g. the ark of taste model of agricultural wealth.
• Industrialization re-emphasized the role of social groups over structures or buildings, as labour specialization[?] became critical to economic success[?]. However, physical capital, as it came to be known, consisting of both the natural capital that made food and the infrastructural capital that made tools, became the focus of analysis of wealth, and ultimately the thesis of Adam Smith that became the basis of modern economics. The theories of David Ricardo, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and later, Karl Marx, form the 18th century and 19th century views of wealth that we now call classical economics and Marxist economics respectively.

Michel Foucault commented on this evolution of ideas in the context of Man as a concept, arguing that "before the 18th century, Man did not exist." The shift from the field called analysis of wealth to the one called first political economy and then just economics, took place as a result of the Enlightenment cultural bias that wealth was an objective fact of living as a human being in a society. The neoclassical economics in particular had the effect of convincing many that economics was in fact a social science and not a set of means of persuasion as it had always been assumed to be in prior eras - self-interested arguments by the powerful why they should remain in power. In The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli had commented in that earlier era on the prudent use of wealth, and the need to tolerate some cruelty and vice in the use of it, in order to maintain appearances of strength and power. Jane Jacobs later offered the observation that there were two different moral syndromes[?] that were common attitudes to wealth and power, and that the one more associated with guardianship[?] did in fact require a degree of ostentacious conspicuous consumption if only to impress others.

This logic is almost entirely absent from neoclassical economics, which in its extreme form argues for the abolition of any political economy apart from the service markets[?] wherein favours may be bought and sold at will, including political ones - the so-called political choice theory popular in the U.S.A.. While it is entirely likely that such assumptions apply in the subcultures that dominate modern discourse on technical economics[?] and especially macroeconomics, the less technical notions of wealth and power that are implied in the older theories of economics and ideas of wealth, still continue as daily facts of life, as home economics and as family values[?].

The 21st century view is that many definitions of wealth itself can exist and continue to co-exist, however prejudiced by a particular money supply and banking system. Measuring well-being is a difficult process but many believe it possible - human development theory being devoted to this. For more on the modern notions of wealth and their interaction see the article on political economy, and for broader ideas consult the list of economics articles and list of ethics articles which put wealth notions in context.

See also: poverty