¶ Wealth
Index Entry
Wealth:
"certificates and his deeds and contracts; the works-- and so he can articulate at any moment. And he’s going from here to another country and he’s going on a ship and the ship is sinking from fire and all the small boats are burnt. And he holds on to his gold and he sinks a little faster than the other people. So he doesn’t have any future either. So whatever that kind of wealth is-- he has all the controls of what we call wealth. We have one man on board who brought along a pneumatic life preserver; and he’s floating out there and he says, ‘Hey, Mister, I’ll give you a billion dollars cash.’ And he says, No thank you.
"In other words, I think that what man really means by wealth, then, is its capability to support forward life. I really want to get now to hard accounting when we get to cosmic accounting. As far as human beings go: do you have any more life? And wealth would be: for how many lives, for how many days-- every thing you need to keep life going-- have you already organised? … The environment is always changing around, transforming. And the resources are there, but how much ‘know-how’ do you have?
“In the terms of yesterday, up to this century when thermodynamics”
