WEALTH. Wealth may be defined either as a state of being or as a category of goods. A state of wealth is practically identical with a state of well-being. It is a condition under which men possess most of the things they need. It is the opposite of a state of poverty. Wealth, however, is generally conceived as a category of goods. As a category of goods it includes all those material things which possess value or, which means the same thing, all those material things of which the community pos sesses less than it would like to have. Or again it consists of all those material things which the community thinks it worth while to strive to get in larger quantities than it already has.
From this point of view it will be seen that there is a very close connection between wealth a% a category of goods and wealth as a state of being, though there is an apparent paradox here. Wealth is contrasted with free goods,— such as air, sunlight, beautiful scenery, abundant water and so forth. It is obvious that the more free goods the community possesses, the greater its well-being. If an object which is now consid ered as wealth could be made sufficiently abund ant to satisfy all possible needs, the community would undoubtedly be better off, but that ob ject would have ceased to be wealth. There would be one less article to include in the cate gory of wealth.
This paradox, however, is only an apparent one. The object of wealth which, under the above illustration, has become a free good, has become such by reason of its abundance. Well being is clearly improved by increasing its abundance. Now any material thing is wealth of which you can say that by increasing its abundance you would increase the well-being of the community. After it has become suffi ciently abundant, you can no longer say that If we have enough air, you cannot say that we would he better off if we had more. It is only when we have not enough that we can say that. Well-being, therefore, depends upon wealth in a very direct, immediate and practical sense. Anything of which we need more than we have is wealth. Anything of which you can say, —more of it, more well-being, less of it. less well-being,-- is wealth. Anything of which you can say that it is worth our while to try to get more of it, is wealth; whereas anything of which you cannot say that, either because it is useless in itself or because we have already as much as we can possibly use, is not wealth.
Wealth as thus defined become an essential factor in the greatest and most practical of all the problems of man on earth: namely, that of adantation. In some respects there is already
perfect adaptation between man and his envi ronment. In such cases there is no particular reason why he should think about or exercise his mind or body over the situation. There are many other cases, however, in which he does not find himself perfectly adapted. If the cli mate is too cold, he needs fuel, clothing and shelter. There is the bc,t possible reason why he should exercise his mind and body over ques tions of this kind. If be lives in a climate where food is not spontaneously produced by nature he will find a scarcity of food. There is. therefore, the best possible reason why he should exercise his mind and body over the food question. So with respect to every thing of which there is a scarcity or of which he feels the need of more than he has, he will work at his great problem of adaptation in proportion as he gives effective attention to these things and ignores those phases of the situation which are not susceptible of improve ment. From this point of view one might al most say that wealth consists of those material things which it is worth our while to concern ourselves about.
Some difference of opinion has arisen as to whether the term wealth should include only material things. Are not intelligence and skill wealth? They are undoubtedly absolutely es sential to the production of wealth, but it is not customary to call them wealth. It seems on the whole better to restrict the use of the term to those material things which are the objects of the exercise of the intelligence and skill rather' than to include intelligence and skill themselves. If we begin to enlarge the defini tion of wealth, it would be very difficult to know where to stop. Should we include the physical texture of the human muscles and the chemical and biological processes which go on inside the human body in our category of wealth? These undoubtedly have a great deal to do with the production of wealth and with our general well being, just as do air and sun-light, but these are not generally the objects of human endeavor and certainly are not consciously thought of in what we call the pursuit of wealth. All defini tions are of course more or less arbitrary. It seems that we must draw the line somewhere between the things which are wealth, and the things which are not wealth. It seems better to include under wealth only those things of which it is worth our while to try to increase our supply.