Facts about Wealth
The political systems of socialism and communism are intended to diminish the conflicts arising from the unequal distribution of wealth.
Wealth has come to mean an abundance of items of economic value, or the state of controlling or possessing such items, and encompasses money, real estate and personal property.
Distribution of wealth in a fair, if not equal, manner thus becomes difficult to achieve.
Great apes seem to have notions of territory and control of food-gathering ranges, but it is questionable whether they understand this as a form of wealth.
Such, in my opinion, is the true gospel concerning wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the rich and the poor.
A wealthy (or rich) individual, community, or nation thus has more resources than a poor one.
The transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau said, "Wealth is the ability to fully experience life."
Government policies like the progressiveness or regressiveness of the tax system can redistribute wealth to the poor or the rich respectively.
Mathematically, a Pareto distribution has often been used to quantify the distribution of wealth, since it models an unequal distribution.
Wealth from the old English word "weal," which means "well-being" or "welfare."
According to the author of Wealth Odyssey, Larry R. Frank Sr., wealth is what sustains you when you are not working.
Like all human activities, wealth redistribution cannot achieve 100 percent efficiency.
Successful individuals such as Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki have written many books on how they succeeded in creating wealth.
There has long existed a school of thought that true wealth lies not in material goods but in emotional happiness.
The idea of true wealth as spiritual brings many to the concept of philanthropy, in which materially rich people give away their possessions presumably to accumulate a greater amount of spiritual wealth.
Other views of wealth include one's health, time, and emotional happiness or spiritual growth.
Gorillas seem to have the capacity to recognize and protect pets and children, but this seems less an idea of wealth than of family.
The Prophet Muhammad said that: "Fearing God in your actions and intentions, and knowing that Almighty God is watching you wherever and whenever you are is the head/peak of wisdom."
Marx, in the Grundrisse, distinguished between material wealth and human wealth, defining human wealth as "wealth in human relations"; land and labor were the source of all material wealth.
The idea is that a government, serving the interests of the proletariat, would confiscate the wealth of the rich and then distribute benefits to the poor.
Adam Smith saw wealth creation as the combination of materials, labor, land, and technology in such a way as to capture a profit (excess above the cost of production).
The continued existence of organizations which survive on donations indicate that modern Western society has succeeded in maintaining a certain level of voluntary distribution of wealth through philanthropy, despite obvious accumulations in certain sectors.
The former Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China are notable examples of countries where, despite aggressive economic regulation, wealth continued to be distributed unevenly.
Large donations from funds created by wealthy individuals are highly visible, although small contributions by many people also offer a wide variety of support within a society.
Public road construction transfers wealth from people that do not use the roads to those people that do (and to those that build the roads).
Early hominids seem to have started with incipient ideas of wealth, similar to that of the great apes.
Many things can affect the creation and destruction of wealth including size of the work force, production efficiency, available resource endowments, inventions, innovations, and availability of capital.
Edmund Burke makes this position explicit in saying "If we command our wealth, we shall be rich and free.
One example is to compare the wealth of the richest ten percent with the wealth of the poorest ten percent.
Public education transfers wealth to families with children in public schools.
Government programs like “disaster relief” transfer wealth to people that have suffered loss due to a natural disaster.
Many of the wealth creating activities mentioned above (cutting down trees, hunting, farming) have an impact on the environment around us.
Other people put equal emphasis on both the creation and the distribution of wealth.
Sociologist Max Weber wrote about a Protestant ethic that drives people to create material wealth for themselves on earth to show how blessed by God they were.
Many have accepted this as the origin of capitalism and the accumulation of wealth.
An individual who is wealthy, affluent, or rich is someone who has accumulated substantial wealth relative to others in their society or reference group.
Islam also has a notion of wealth as a spiritual rather than material goods.
The act of redistribution itself has certain costs associated with it, due to the necessary maintenance of the infrastructure that is required to collect the wealth in question and then redistribute it.
According to Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, wealth is nothing more than a measurement of time.