I saw classy person out in public the other day. That’s the image she projected anyway. Nice clothes, shoes, purse, the whole gamut. She tossed her plastic water bottle in the trash and I kindly told her that her bottle was made of high grade recyclable plastic. Her face crinkled up to the right just slightly as she told me “I don’t recycle” as if to tell me she was too cool for that. Like a total pussy cat, I just bit my tongue; I wanted to tell her about what wealth really is. I didn’t lecture her though, because in this society, you’re out of line if you make a fuss over a little plastic bottle. But, knowing the macro value of recycling that plastic bottle at the micro-economic level is what really makes a society wealthy; yet ironically, this is what’s considered trivial by people who want so bad to pretend they are wealthy. Thank goodness I have this outlet to air things out with some science. As Tosh would say, let’s take a closer look at this ironic behavior in this week’s breakdown.
To understand wealth, let’s start with the very basics: the word economy. The word economy is better understood in its original form as inherited from the Greeks, οἰκονόμος. That funny looking word is the original Greek word for economy and simply means managing the household; when people say world economy, you could think of them as saying managing the world’s household. Unfortunately however, when you hear the word economy on any news channel in the USA, they mean GDP (or Gross Domestic Product) only. This is because the industry powers that have morphed into monopolistic control of our legislation and news media have a vested interest in your consumption lifestyle. You see, it’s labor that actually gives money value. As long as your working inefficiently, you’re still working; and that’s good for the man. If we stopped and thought for a moment about how to be more efficient with our waste we could cut production (GDP) and distribution and make gains that allowed us to work less and increase our wealth as it was defined by Adam Smith. Who’s Adam Smith you ask? He’s the guy who’s economic treatise has given us such a nice framework to develop one of the strongest economies in world. But, at its heart, the book Wealth of Nations was an anti-monopoly book, because monopolies ruin nations. And the monopolies in charge right now are absolutely content with you going on with your consumption lifestyle.
