{"id":25809,"date":"2017-09-19T05:48:22","date_gmt":"2017-09-19T10:48:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25809"},"modified":"2017-09-19T05:48:22","modified_gmt":"2017-09-19T10:48:22","slug":"what-is-real-wealth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25809","title":{"rendered":"What Is Real Wealth?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><a href=\"http:\/\/www.oftwominds.com\/blogsept17\/real-wealth9-17.html\">What Is Real Wealth?<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><i>As for acquiring capital&#8211;the most important types of capital don&#8217;t require much money. <\/i><\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.oftwominds.com\/photos2017\/McDuck2017.jpg\" align=\"left\" border=\"0\" \/><\/p>\n<p><b>What is real wealth? Money, right? Currency, gold, quatloos, you name it.<\/b>Money is real wealth because you can use it to buy whatever you want.<\/p>\n<p><b>I would argue money in any form is only the <i>means to acquire real wealth<\/i>, which is <i>the agency, opportunity and time to pursue your life&#8217;s work<\/i>.<\/b><\/p>\n<p><b>The conventional view that <i>wealth is money and leisure<\/i> has it all wrong.<\/b> Let&#8217;s imagine the owner of a vault of conventional treasure: jewels, gold coins, etc.<\/p>\n<p>If the &#8220;wealth&#8221; stays in the vault, what&#8217;s the point of owning this &#8220;wealth&#8221;? The secret satisfaction of being &#8220;wealthy&#8221;?<\/p>\n<p><b>If &#8220;wealth&#8221; is only an internal state, then let&#8217;s measure friendship and being needed\/wanted as the metrics of &#8220;wealth.&#8221;<\/b> You see the point; if &#8220;wealth&#8221; is merely an internal state of satisfaction, then a vault full of &#8220;money&#8221; is a poor metric.<\/p>\n<p><b>What money buys that is real wealth is freedom and control of one&#8217;s life.<\/b> This control over one&#8217;s life is called <i>agency<\/i>. Agency is defined as &#8220;the capacity of an actor to act in a given environment.&#8221; This may not seem like a profound concept, but another way to describe agency is that <b>agency is the opposite of powerlessness.<\/b><\/p>\n<p>People with agency define themselves and their identity; they shape the world they inhabit rather than passively await whatever circumstances deliver up.<\/p>\n<p>In the real world, people with agency move on when things no longer work for them in a particular situation. Agency is not just the opposite of feeling powerless; it&#8217;s also the opposite of <i>victimhood<\/i>, i.e. the state of being in which others are held responsible for all of one&#8217;s travails and difficulties.<\/p>\n<p>Agency and responsibility are two sides of the same coin: each manifests the other.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What Is Real Wealth? As for acquiring capital&#8211;the most important types of capital don&#8217;t require much money. What is real wealth? Money, right? Currency, gold, quatloos, you name it.Money is real wealth because you can use it to buy whatever you want. I would argue money in any form is only the means to acquire [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6],"tags":[127,951,374,16052,536,587,868],"class_list":["post-25809","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-currency","tag-gold","tag-leisure","tag-money","tag-of-two-minds","tag-wealth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25809"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25809\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25810,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25809\/revisions\/25810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}