It is also fact that the more money you have, the more options to increase your wealth are actually offered to you. Means there is no "equal footing" to begin with. And when it comes to covering your basic human needs there is an upper limit to that, even if you go the luxury route.
True, but the total wealth increases. Money is just a proxy for the things we want. the things we want are the actual wealth. When you can buy 50" LCD screen for 200$ instead of 700$, you've got more wealth, same for land: that's Progress.
Wealth is not distributed equally either, those with a lot of resources find it much easier to maintain and gain wealth. Wealth provides a shield against consequences and accidents.
There's more to wealth than money. I don't even mean that as some sort of hippy "all you need is love" sort of thing, I mean it's true in real life. A person who has multiple options to make $30,000/yr is better off that a person who has only one, who is still better off than someone who is getting $30,000/yr from the government, and is thus completely subject to their whims and bureaucracy. There's also significant differences between these when scaled to the societal level, between a robust society, a fragile society, and a society where the government is now master of the people rather than the other way around. For the fragile case, for instance, consider the automotive industry in Michigan, where a lot of people saw their one good option drop to zero.
Money is only one component of wealth. Unless you have the "fuck you" money (in local parlance), it's not enough on its own to be "wealthy". I think even trained economists can forget this sometimes.
I think you are missing the point. Wealth is almost only restricted by natural and human resources.
However, getting paid in a currency is directly limited by total currency in circulation. Of the total items of wealth in the world, if more and more currency is hoarded at the top 1%, only the top 1% can afford the wealth created by the rest.
In other worlds, wealth is increasing but the purchasing power of it is not reaching everyone proportional to the wealth they are creating.
The biggest thing is that's not a very natural distribution for a parameter like wealth. You'd have a VERY hard time trying to maintain that given innate differences between individuals in terms of expense of effort and the like. There will always be ways to try to gain additional "wealth" that doesn't meet whatever definition you try to use to equate everything.
Eventually wealth relies on some physical resource somewhere down the line, so it's also not true imo. Wealth is remote from limits but not limitless I would say.
> it's all about relative wealth. if you are more wealthy, you have relatively more say in the way society goes, at least in the way that things are configured currently.
This is a problem with the way things are configured currently. It doesn't mean absolute wealth doesn't matter.
"With a fortune of that size, additional wealth is about little more than score-keeping."
No. I hate this sentiment. Having more wealth is it's about expanding one's ability to act, increasing one's economic influence, and, most generally, being able to shape the world how one likes. This is true regardless of income level. Wealth is never about "keeping score."
Wealth only really matters to the point where you can support a good living. That "good" will vary but beyond that increases in wealth bring diminished returns. Think about a salary: if it's below a threshold you are unhappy no matter what. Above that any raise brings more marginal increases in satisfaction, you start looking at other things for that.
The US is past that point so now it needs more than wealth.
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