All Wealth Is Created Out Of Thin Air
I was fortunate enough to meet and talk to a Geshe. In Tibetan Buddhism, the title "Geshe" is the highest level that a monk can achieve and requires, among other things, at least a 3 years long meditation retreat. In fact, it's a 3 years, 3 months and 3 days.
He was a Westerner, not an Asian and he started to practice Buddhism when he was already in his twenties. And yet, he completed that 3 year long retreat in his late thirties and eventually he got the Geshe title.
Interestingly enough, he mixed his Buddhist practice with what we call "business". But he strived to make it an "enlightened" type of business, as much as he could.
Obviously, one of the conversations we had was about money.
He told me an interesting story about wealth. When he started his retreat it was late nineties. For 3 years, he didn't see anyone and he barely speak to other people. He was completely cut off from the world. All he did was to meditate.
When he came out, he observed that something really interesting happened. Business, or what people were calling business, was done in a different way, on a different medium.
Namely, the internet. While he was away, the world kept spinning around and a new type of wealth appeared: internet money. I was very surprised to observe he wasn't surprised about that. He was a bit intrigued by the form of the new wealth, by its "structure" but he kept talking to me about the fact that wealth is not necessarily oil, as was the case in the late nineties.
Wealth is what we agree is wealth.
And that's how I learned that wealth, all wealth, is created "out of thin air".
Let me explain.
The objective quality of what we call "wealth", like the pegging of a certain currency to gold, the standards, the exchange rates, all this is linked to a context. And all contexts are changing, all the time.
Keeping your mind fixated in a certain context will limit the chances to enter into a new set of agreements, just like people who resisted the internet wave went out of business. Some of them understood that a new paradigm shift was happening and embraced the wave. Some of them were cautious and tried to get the best of both worlds. But at the end of the day, those who kept an open mind and were ready to challenge "the establishment of money" were the ones who won.
I felt the need to share this story because, lately, I see how crypto is generating a new wave of wealth and many skeptics are calling it off because it happens "out of thin air". All these air-dropped coins, like Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Gold, all these ICOs, all the pumps and dumps which are leveraging insane amounts of wealth are too much to process for some of us. I confess that, for a while, it was too much to process for me as well. Until I remembered this conversation with Geshe and realized that we all live in the same Samsara, which can be described, among many other ways, as a "shared illusion".
Of course, I'm not expecting the speed of this growth to be the constant. As a matter of fact, I expect a correction to happen, just like the dot-com bubble happened at the beginning of 2000s. But once that dot-com correction was done, the growth became a healthy, consistent one, changing the landscape of our world forever.
Alas, as limited beings, we can make sense of reality only in hindsight. What we are "creating forward" is pretty much instinctual, or, at best, just wishful thinking. But if we look back with enough lucidity and we accept the fact that what we call "reality" is just a constant approximation of our sensations, a shared set of agreements, then we can see some patterns.
I'm not talking about some spiritual mumbo-jumbo here. I'm talking about "hard", "cold" evidence.
In 1996, the top 4 companies by market cap in the world were General Electric, Royal Dutch Shell, The Coca-Cola Company and Nippon Telegraph And Telecom.
20 years later, the top 4 companies are Apple, Microsoft, Google Alphabet and Amazon.
Data is taken from Wikipedia list of top companies by market cap.
Look very carefully at this list and try to understand:
- how the current giants emerged?
- how the 20-years-from-now-giants will be called and what their market cap will be (if any)?
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
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Damn, this is a good article! Really gives me something to think about, I like it :-)
Glad to give you some food for thought :)
Indeed wealth is what we agree is wealth. The dollar is not backed by anything real. It is monopoly money. Some believe it will only be worth wall paper. But today we agree to give it value. Wealth can be made out of thin air if we believe and accept it as wealth. The minute we do not it is worthless. A wonderful story and info. Thanks.
If we accept "wealth is what we agree is wealth" for what it says (as I see it), then a great deal of what we can agree is wealth need not come from thin air.
From my viewpoint (unfortunately, I have no idea how many agree with this approach to wealth), wealth lies predominantly (if not almost entirely) in real assets, including my (and yours) knowledge, experience, state of health and fitness, our crops, animals, etc. It is this wealth that allows societies to resume business quickly after a reset in the monetary system.
All this is IMHO, of course, and I am usually wrong in my assertions! At the same time, I like to tell my family/friends that I feel that I am every bit as wealthy as Bill Gates, and I mean it seriously (except, of course, I do not have the transformation function that allows us convert a measure of my kind of wealth into his, and vice versa). I only know I do not have much respect for his monetary wealth, while recognizing the power that social constructs and institutional arrangements have conferred upon great monetary wealth.
However, one desideratum falls out of this viewpoint: we should start all discussions on this topic by telling g people how we are defining the word "wealth".
"the full faith and credit"... the legions fought to keep the market safe (where their families too came to buy and sell) and the market fought in his own way to provide anything needed to defend the market (and everything else). it's a symbiotic relation. the rest is only accounting. the real word is trust or fides, which is used in fiduciary.
http://www.csun.edu/~hcfll004/fides.html
Thanks for contributing this. Really interesting.
thanks, I know it may sound dark to think that lethality is at the center of economic life, but it's the only way to defend propriety against thieves and worst...
did an edit :)
Giants of tomorrow could be DAOs like this one :), if the concepts of continuous token models are adopted because I don’t think we’ll have structures that last very long from now on..
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari is an interesting read about his hypothesis that our stories create networks for currency. And now with blockchain tech, our faith is shifting to mathematics, and hence, networks are becoming markets.
Thanks for the book recommendation, sounds like this is a book that I would enjoy.
Networks were always markets, but their "tokens" weren't formalized until cryptography provided a tamper-proof method. Just like people always had the ability to become influencers, but this didn't happen until the speed of info propagation exploded, with the interwebs.
Interesting that a Tibetan monk discovered a better understanding of our financial system that all the current Ivy League scholars, and he did so by removing himself from all things, including the financial system. Many today don't see the forest, due to the trees.
outside of the box, completely, on all levels :)
Prof. Nigel Dodd at LSE has been writing about money as a social construct for a very long time. He has been doing this work from the Dept. of Sociology (not Economics)!
You are quite right about the value of money ie it’s zero ...it’s printed and a false value attached to it . It is still the greatest deception ever . Crypto is a great promise ... but I believe it’s created by A few covert agencies ... cryptos ensure the the dominance of empire known as the United States ....
Let's see what comes out of all that new deception.
Beautifully written. Step out of the box and mindset and look at things from a more distant perspective. That is a great insight into value creation. I agree, the current crypto growth is fueled by newcomers and is not sustainable. That is also the reason we should look out for projects that we can really get behind and believe they are going to be around and in 10 years from now, when choosing our investments and not just the "coin of the month".
true words of wisdom
I had not idea you were also a Philosopher. I fully understand how fine your mind went on this issue. I confess I learned while you refresh my INTJ mind. I like very much the idea of context within a dynamic environment and the concept that our senses/intuition/mind can only approximate reality.
I'm not a Philosopher, but I'm glad if this article was useful :)
Well. Like it or not. What you wrote is philosophy. Very few people will tell that, but your whole explanation is full of philosophical implications about how constraints and senses constraint our view of reality. Thanks for writing that post. Believe me, it impact me. And I am going to read it at least 3 times and I am going to share amongst me friends off steemit.com
Thanks for that statement from the high mountains of wisdom. I always like to read your blog.
Your point on how easily things change as far as the market cap is concerned is well-taken. At different times in different eras, varying circumstances have led to the leaders losing their positions and a new leader emerging - this is as true about companies as it is about countries. Post the second World War, USA took advantage of their geographical factors to lead the world into the next few decades. The same happened with the internet bubble burst - the top market caps before the burst and after it was different and it wouldn't surprise me if sometime down the line, the Crypto world follows the same route. Good narration about the Buddhist monk :)