How do you get rich?

Suppose we lived in a world where every contact with other people came out absolutely fair and quits. It would mean that the result of every contact was the same as before the contact, and we would die with exactly the same value we were born with. All that would happen in our life is that we would exchange things of equal value and no one would win or lose. It would make exchange pointless.

Our desires are always changing, and two people never want the same thing. It means that given any commodity C each person will want it a different amount. In a system of barter anyone who wanted C more than the owner could get it if they had a commodity D which the owner of C wanted more than C. In a very busy market, with people shopping around for best deals, exchanges will approach fairness.

Exchange thus happens because there is no absolute value, and as a result each exchange, while in absolute a loss of a commodity to the seller and the gain to the buyer, results in sum greater than the parts because each person now has something they want more than before.

So one way to wealth is to surround our self with what we want, and that is easiest if we want what no one else wants, and hardest if we want what everyone else wants. We already argued there is no absolute value, so no fixed reason why anyone should want anything more than another. We run into the alternative problem tho that if no one wants something then no one is going to be bothered to make it, so there won't be any around. This is reflected in supply/demand prices. In a free market, if we can chose and we want to easiest life, it is best to want what is either coming into fashion early, or what has just gone out of fashion. But then we have the much more complex problem that fashion itself is desirable because it sets social status which is itself desirable. Anyway I digress.

If we were born with nothing however we wouldn't ever be able to trade. We can't make something out of nothing. We would need say a 1p piece to get started. Then buy a 1p sweet. Don't consume it but instead go somewhere where there are no sweets and sell its opportunity cost for 10p. Go back and get some more sweets and do again to get 100p. Then buy some water and go to a desert and sell it for £5 to someone thirsty and so we could go on. But we need to start somewhere. In this example we are also able bodied, must have some food and water to sustain us during the exercise, be free from persecution, must have air, a healthy enough environment, we need to have been born, we need time... there is a huge amount of wealth that we are born with that is often over looked.

So in being born we are already very wealthy. Now the point of writing this was just to question whether our wealth ever really changes. Do we die with the same wealth we were born with, and does anything really change?

Yes, our desires changes, and as a result we exchange different things. As a child we are reluctant to exchange time and prefer mucking around with friends. As we grow older we exchange more and more time in the market place to accumulate things, especially the commodities needed to have a family our self. Time of course is something everyone is born with, we can't buy that itself. But what we can do, if we are materially wealthy, is then exchanging our wealth for other people's time. So we don't walk to the shops anymore, we pay someone to do that for us and this frees up some time.

Traditionally people would say that wealth was created by hard work. But the ability and time to do this is something we were already given, a wealth we already had. We are exchanging those no longer needed qualities for things we want.

Now enter money. If we trade our personal wealth for accumulating money we can be sure that in the future we can exchange that money for things we want. If you couldn't spend money it would be worthless, so we don't want money itself but only what we can exchange for money.

The question is whether we can get more in the future than what we spent getting the money. An example would be accumulating money while able bodied to exchange when we are ill. We should over do this however: when ill what we really want is able bodied, but what did we do when able bodied if we only saved it for when we were ill. I guess there are other things we want other than able bodies, so when ill we can enjoy these at the expense of our "able bodiedness" that we spent on working.

So far it appears that indeed via trading we do generate more satisfaction. But unclear when we die whether there has actually been any change of value compared with what we were born with.

As usual I'm in a hurry to hammer out a seedling idea. To be developed in future...