Money All the way Baby! You need tons of hard currency To be wealthy. Like Scrooge McDuck Diving into his money bin.
Oh, by the way, are you going to tell us the correct answer before or after you get thrown out of your economics course?
I went with Labour because the value of the USA and Canadian dollar is backed up by the productivity of Americans and Canadians which depends largely on our work ethic.
Anything of value in your possession. Your assets. Your labor is not wealth, you can gain wealth from it with the income you can derive from it. Your money is just one form of wealth, my guitars and studio equipment is part of my wealth. Why ask?
Total net worth, so money plus possessions, less any liabilities. It can include intangible assets such as copyright and goodwill, but could be affected by contingent liabilities and future commitments.
None of the above, a person can be can be quite wealthy without any money, possessions, or income. Wealth is a state of mind and a way of living.
Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Labor is wealth. Labor creates everything. Money, gold, stocks, and representations of wealth are just that.... representations. No commodity is worth anything until labor makes it available. The value of labor is so valuable, that slavery was a completely acceptable practice for most of human existence. Today we have a different form of slavery, but slavery still exists and serves the purpose of keeping the .01% living in opulence while the rest of humanity struggles for survival. Our entire economic system is designed to control labor. It works amazingly well. Most of humanity will work their entire lives and die without accumulating any wealth, an entire lifetime of labor that goes to enrich others.......
Wrong, wealth is labor. All prosperity comes from labor. It is labor that creates the "Material prosperity".
So if I sit on my backside and I inherit £1m....... I'm in debt by £10m and my labour generates £500,000 a year. Am I wealthy? A dictionary will tell you that wealth is being rich, an abundance of valuable possessions or money. The possessions can be tangible and intangible. You may obtain these through labour but the accumulation of your wealth is not wholly and exclusive to labour. If I inherit £1m and it's in a savings account paying me £30,000 a year, then I'm not work and thus not earning my £30,000 via labour. So the answer is material prosperity, aka, possessions.
Wealth is money, and, those commodities that can be monitized (or which have a fixed monetary value associated with them which commands consistent demand in a free marketplace). Example: you've got a gold coin of a type that is valued in the market at $1,300. Then, that coin has a presumed money-value of $1,300. Or, you own five acres of land in an area where land typically sells for $5,000 per acre. Then, that land has a presumed value of $25,000.
You may not have worked for your imagined prosperity, but someone did. You are wrong, material prosperity is worthless on its own. It is labor that creates value. If you do not understand that you do not know the first thing about economics.
Money is a representation of labor. It in itself is wothless. If I have access to the labor of 50 men, I can live the life of luxury without a dollar.. If you on the other hand have 50 million dollars, and no access to labor, you had better develop a taste for money because you will have to eat it to survive.
But labor in itself is intangible. The money itself may be a figment of our imaginations (as the U. S. Dollar has been since Idiot Nixon took us off the Gold Standard), but it has imputed, direct value. So do gold coins, real estate, etc. But 'labor'...? How do you sell 'labor', unless you own slaves or something, and rent them out for recurring income (?). I'm not sure I understand the de facto value, per se, of 'labor'....
You are looking at this issue the wrong way. The establishment is focused on one thing, and that is getting as many people to get up in the morning and go to work as possible. In fact they have designed an economic system that is geared precisely to do just that. A combination of the fractional banking system, inflation, and a debt based culture combine to keep people working well into their retirement years due to the fact the vast majority cannot achieve financial independence. The effect of this system is that most people work their entire lives, and die broke, with the fruits of a lifetime of labor going to the banks, government, and multinational corporations. It does not matter what medium you use to keep track of wealth, wealth is created and therefore is labor. Slave owners understood that for tens of thousands of years. They still do, now it is just known as wage slavery.
Well, you're right. For many years, I, too, got up in the morning and did what I had to do to earn money to survive and 'get ahead'. Like millions of other people, I had no choice because I did not have financial independence. Through the years, I did gain that financial independence, became debt-free, and accumulated sufficient wealth to live the rest of my life in comfort and security -- but as you suggest, I was not able to achieve that until I was of retirement-age. I do not doubt that "the captains of industry" run everything to suit themselves and enrich their own fortunes. But, conversely, nobody is being forced to work for them! Thus, these business owners must offer compensation to their workers that is acceptable to all concerned, or there will only be one person working -- the business owner.... Thus, if you will, each has a kind of 'strangle-hold' on the other: the owner can't make his enterprise work without the appropriate labor force, and, those workers can't have gainful, rewarding employment without the owner's business hiring them. Did I get that part wrong...? I'm not trying to be coy... I would have loved to have been born independently wealthy. And, human nature being what mine also is, as a second-choice, I would have loved for a government to be able to simply give me an enjoyable, fully-funded, 'cradle-to-grave' living, complete with most of what I desire, and demand nothing of me in return. It might resemble some sort of 'Star Trek'-era Utopia! (Did you ever see anybody on Star Trek busting their butts at some crap-job they destested for cheap-chump wages?). Maybe in three or four hundred years we'll have no need for anyone to work anymore, and we'll be flying through the universe at several times the speed of light. But, in all candor, I sincerely doubt it.... Science may provide huge, innovative advancements in dramatically-short periods of time, but simple human nature does not.... We're still basically the same kind of people we were at the beginning of recorded human history.
