Human wealth comes from reliable ideas
World-wide wealth in terms of “Real Capital” (plants in operation, actual known resources etc.) has been doubling every generation since economists started collecting statistics in the 18th Century. Where does this wealth come from’? According to orthodox economists it comes from land, labor, and capital. According to Marxists, it comes from land and labor alone, and the capitalist is a thief who has inserted an artificial book-keeping system into the process. Both are wrong. Land and labor alone, and land, labor and capital together, can’t produce new wealth if they are all organized by a fallacious idea, such as searching for oil where oil is not. The real source of wealth is correct ideas: workable ideas: that is, negentropy. The origin of these coherent (workable) ideas is the human nervous system. All wealth is created by human beings using their neurons intelligently.
A neurotic young man once went to a Zen Master and asked how he could find peace of mind. “How can you lack anything,” the Roshi asked “when you own the greatest treasure in the universe?” “How do I own the greatest treasure in the universe?” asked the young man, baffled. “The place that question comes from is the greatest treasure in the universe,” said the Master, being more explicit than is common for a Zen teacher. Of course, as a Buddhist, the Master had taken a vow of poverty and did not mean exactly what we mean here. But he knew that the brain produces all that we experience—all our pain and worry, all our bliss states and ecstasies, all our higher evolutionary vistas and trans-time Peak Experiences, etc. It is also “the greatest treasure in the universe” in the most materialistic economic sense: it creates all the ideas which, socially employed, become wealth: roads, scientific laws, calendars, factories, computers, life-saving drugs, medicines, ox-carts, autos, jet planes, spaceships …
References
- Wilson, A., Robert. (1983). Prometheus Rising Chapter 7 The Time-Binding Dialectic Acceleration & Deceleration (Location 1274). Grand Junction, Colorado: Hilaritas Press.
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