Re: Hal - Old wealth vs new wealth
All wealth, wealth independent of money, is the stuff and services that are produced right now or are available for use because they were saved (like a barrel full of apples from last autumn.) In societies where money did not play a big part, the wealthy man was the one whose social position allowed him to own a share of what his inferiors produced. There was a manor, there was the man who owned the manor, and there were other men who owed their work and their produce to the manor.
Enter money. Money can be saved, and used in the future as a claim on produce and services. Money allows the concept of capital, investment in plant and process that consumes money at the outset but returns money later. The capitalist gets to enjoy all the wonderful perishable items that made the manorial lord's life sweet, the apples and the wine and the clothes and the servants, but without a constraining, feudalistic social relationship. At least, that's the new style of wealth. Some of the capitalists I see seem to hanker for the entitlements of the old style. We'll probably see that come back somewhere in the long, long future.
Anyway, once you have money, you have more ways to experience wealth, and with money, everybody can work in more specialized and capital-intensive ways, producing more than they could have in the days of the kingdom of Ur. Wealth is in part just money, but is also the ability to own an asset and have access to a market where it can be sold (for money.) Property rights are a different set of concepts today than they were at the time of the French Revolution, and the flexibility of the concept of property is just as essential to wealth as the power of money.
