Wealth

Wealth is a lot of things. It is much more than just money.

• Merriam-Webster defines 'wealth' as abundance of valuable material possessions or resources.
• The United Nations definition of inclusive wealth is a monetary measure which includes the sum of natural, human, and physical assets. Natural capital includes land, forests, energy resources, and minerals. Human capital is the population's education and skills. Physical capital includes such things as machinery, buildings, and infrastructure.
• Wealth means different things to different people. Wealth has a meaning that varies from person to person as well as family to family.
• Wealth is what you accumulate — not what you make. If you were to stop working tomorrow, how long could you support your current lifestyle? That is what makes you wealthy.
• A community, region or country that possesses an abundance of such possessions or resources to the benefit of the common good is known as wealthy.
• The wealth of households in the world amounts to USD 280 trillion (2017).
• The net worth of a person, household, or nation – is the value of all assets owned net of all liabilities owed at a point in time.
• Wealth is created through using labor and/or capital to make things, or provide/perform services, that other people find valuable. In the modern information economy, computer programmers often create wealth too, so it isn't necessary to create a tangible product in order to create wealth.
• Wealth means being able to be financially free to do the things you love, to live the way you want to live. But it also means being healthy, and to know that your family and the ones you care about are healthy and spiritually whole, and that they’re contributing.
• Wealth provides access to more. While money doesn’t make you happy, it does give you freedom to not worry about those financial stresses
• Having excess income allows you to be more involved with family and community.
• If you’re a healthy person, you are already wealthy. If you have your health, if you have your life, you can accomplish pretty much anything if you get the right mind-set.
• Material aspect of wealth is very important, because everything else is much easier to plan around if you are financially stable.
• For the poor it is always survival mode. The transition from scarce resources to financial security will be a challenge. It’s always about choices.
• Spending and taking care of money is a skill — not everybody has that skill.
• On the business side, wealth creates opportunities. On the personal side, wealth is about having more security and giving more to those you love.
• Wealth means you have the luxury of being able to provide for your family and determine how much work you want to do.

Rich is having abundant financial assets: money, real estate, investments, material possessions, etc. Wealth has four categories of assets:

1. Core Assets: your family, values, faith, health and the individual well-being of each family member;
2. Experience Assets: good and bad experiences, education, reputation, networks, knowledge and the wisdom of each family member;
3. Contribution Assets: contributions made to the well-being of others;
4. Financial Assets: money, real estate, investments, material possessions.

Personal luxury

Luxury is not about money. It is about living a truly authentic life. Luxury products were created to help people live a more comfortable life. Comfort is readily available to anyone not through buying more, but by just slowing down and enjoying the beauty that exists in a life simply lived.

• Luxury is not the opposite of poverty. It is the opposite of vulgarity.
• True luxury is about authenticity, and cannot be created by buying more. 
• Luxury is not a matter of having more or less. 
• Luxury is about creating an environment that liberates your aspirations.
• Luxury is about removing the distractions and living life the way you want to live.
• It is not living a spartan life or the life of an ascetic. It is not about reducing for the sake of reducing. 
• It is not about an idea of giving away everything you own in order to be happy.
• The journey of life is about discovering the right balance between work and play, people and things to help you create a life that is authentically yours.
• True luxury is not about being the first to have whatever the latest marketing campaign is pitching. True luxury is a very personal idea. 
• True luxury is about being able to liberate your aspirations in your own personal way. 
• True luxury is about creating the right balance in your life so that you have time for the things that matter most.
• Those watches, cars, jets and McMansions all cost time to amass them, but also the time it takes to maintain them and to dote over them. They demand your time as you cherish them and adore them.
• There is only so much time in the world. More cannot be created. It cannot be sold or traded. It can only be drawn upon, and the less you waste on the distractions of life, the more you have to spend creating a life that is truly yours and that is a true luxury.
• Regardless of how much money you have or how many baubles you might cherish, learn to simplify your life and you will learn the value of a minute.
• Invest your time not just in managing money and things but in relationships that supports, nurtures and helps you grow.
• In the end, success and affluence and luxury is not about showing off the latest gadget. It is not about having a bigger car or larger house. It is about being able to manage your time and your life, your way.

Take the time to evaluate what is important in your life and let that be the guideline, not just for happiness, but for living a rewarding, successful, and luxurious life.

Read the source article

Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy ... Robert A. Heinlein

Luxury is the enemy of growth. Abundance is neither good nor healthy 
for the growth of a child’s mind ...  Abhijit Naskar

Economic growth will destroy everything

• Everyone wants everything. How is that going to work? 
• Economic growth promises that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs.The promise of private luxury for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space exists.
• The planet that sustains us is already bursting through the physical limits. Climate breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic etc all are driven by rising consumption. 
• Growth must go on: this is everywhere the political imperative.
• Simple Lifers who seek to resist growth & its impact will be silenced, especially by the media. 
• Thirty years ago, it was ridiculous to buy bottled water, where tap water is clean and abundant. Today, we use a million plastic bottles a minute, worldwide.
• Green consumerism is not a solution for planetary survival. There is no significant difference between the ecological footprints of people who care about their impacts and people who don’t.
• Those who identify themselves as conscious consumers use more energy and carbon than those who do not.
• Environmental awareness is higher among wealthy people. The richer we are, the bigger is our ecological footprint, regardless of our good intentions. The green consumers mainly focus on behaviors that have relatively small benefits.
• People who recycle meticulously, save their plastic bags, carefully measure the water in their kettles, then take their holidays abroad that cancels their environmental savings 100-fold. 
• People who have gone green in no way enable them to overlook their greater impacts.
• None of these means that we should not try to reduce our impacts, but we should be aware of the limits of the exercise. Our behaviour within the system cannot change the outcomes of the system. It is the system that needs to change.
• World’s richest 1% produce around 175 times as much carbon as the poorest 10%. 
• If everyone aspires for higher incomes, how the earth will support its impacts.
• As growth outpaces efficiency, the total use of resources keeps rising. Efficiency with its physical limits, decoupling from the use of essential resources is impossible.
• A global growth rate of 3% means that the size of the world economy doubles every 24 years. This is why environmental crises are accelerating at such a rate. Yet the plan is to ensure that it doubles in perpetuity. 
• Perpetual growth is unsustainable on a planet that is not growing.
• Poorest 60% of the world’s people receive only 5% of the additional income generated by rising GDP. A $111 of growth is required for every $1 reduction in poverty. On current trends, it would take 200 years to ensure that everyone receives $5 a day. By this point, average per capita income will have reached $1m a year, and the economy will be 175 times bigger than it is today. This is not a formula for poverty relief. It is a formula for the destruction of everything and everyone.
• Those who see an indefinite rise in consumption as normal and necessary, are beserkers, destroying the prosperity of future generations.
• Green consumerism, material decoupling, sustainable growth are all illusions, designed to justify an economic model that is driving us to catastrophe. The current system, based on private luxury and public squalor, will eventually impoverish us all.
• We need a different system that establish the parameters by which we judge its health. We need to build a world in which growth is unnecessary, a world of private sufficiency and public luxury. And we must do it before catastrophe forces our hand.

The rising rate of homelessness in places like San Diego
is one of the signs of growing poverty in the United States.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem 

brings us face to face with another problem ... Martin Luther King, Jr.

Read the source article

The only benefit of the rapid economic growth is millions of people are lifted from impacts of extreme poverty. The rest of the benefits are illusory. In the late last century, unfettered capitalism in the United States led to rapid economic expansion. This was characterized by widening class disparities and profound economic insecurity among the poor. Today, forty million Americans live in poverty, nearly half in deep poverty who live on less than $2 per day per person and don’t have access to basic human services such as sanitation, shelter, education and health care.