Essay On Wealth

LITERATURE REVIEW

Define Wealth:

Wealth usually refers to money, property or something which has economic value attached to it. It is the abundance of objects of value and also the state of having accumulated these objects. The use of the word itself assumes some socially-accepted means of identifying objects, land, or money 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 vary among societies. Anthropology characterizes societies, in part, based on a society's concept of wealth, and the institutional structures and power used to protect this wealth. Several types

The theories of David Ricardo, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and later, Karl Marx, in the 18th and 19th century built on these views of wealth that we now call classical economics and Marxist economics. Michel Foucault commented that the concept of Man as an aggregate did not exist before the 18th century. The shift from the analysis of an individual's wealth to the concept of an aggregation of all men is implied in the concepts of political economy and then economics. This transition took place as a result of a cultural bias inherent in the Enlightenment. Wealth was seen as an objective fact of living as a human being in a society. Some people believe wealth is a zero-sum game, where there is a limited amount of wealth and some must lose in order for others to gain. As a result they are concerned primarily with issues of wealth distribution rather than wealth creation. Others believe that wealth can be readily created. They feel that wealth is not a fixed amount to be distributed. To most of these people, organizing a society so as to optimize the growth of wealth is more important than distribution issues. Many of these people believe in some version of the trickle-down theory in which newly created wealth "trickles down" to all strata of society, thereby making the question of distribution mute.

Sources of Wealth:

Wealth is created through several means.

• Natural resources can be harvested and sold to those who want them.

• Material can be changed into something more valuable through proper application of labor and equipment.

• Better methods also create wealth by allowing faster creation of wealth.

• Ideas create wealth by allowing it to be created faster or with new methods.

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