The investment game, Inflation and the cost of goods.

[Hoofhurr]

I was wondering about this earlier. Where is value truly created? If you average out the total sum of all the monetary wealth in the world to include the boom and busts of the last 10 years and divide that number by the total number of people in the world do you get a number that is that far ahead of the per capita wealth of say 1920 or 1800?

If it is and I'm not sure that it is, where did that additional wealth come from? My guess is that 50% of it was extracted from the natural environment and 50% of it is somehow simply tied into the fact that there are more people on the planet. I'd say the vast majority of wealth in the world is simply the result of taking stuff from the earth and giving it to an ever increasing number of people. The two seem to be linked.

Isn't investment/banking/lending, just moving wealth from one person to another? A really complicated and probably not truly profitable way of redistributing the wealth? Where is value really created in that system?

The only thing I can see is that on the whole we have access to a better standard of living. Our health ought to be better and we ought not go hungry or homeless as much as someone had the chance of going in Roman times. We have more shit too. Some of which is nice.

I think this is a fairly linear view on wealth though. Prospecting, extraction, manufacturing, make more food, create better health, make more babies, live longer, rinse repeat. At some point that chain has to feed in on itself as we run out of new places to prospect and extract from and as we start to pay the true cost of the extraction processes and having so many people living on top of each other. We haven't even really begun to pay the penalty for that yet.

So ya, ultimately, I think a citizen of the US is better off than a citizen of Rome but that much better off?

Let me ask you this. Is it possible for everyone on the planet to be rich if they work hard enough? Why or why not?