Thoughts on How to Make Wealth? 如何獲取財富？

(This post was written originally in 2020 and was inspired by Paul Graham’s article “How to Make Wealth.”)

English Version (中文版本在下方)

We spend our lives trapped in narrow frameworks. We think money equals wealth. We assume everything is zero-sum. But we often overlook one crucial thing: wealth can grow alongside redistribution. We forget the core meaning of wealth, and we ignore the fact that wealth itself has never been scarce.

So what is wealth?

Wealth is the total number of satisfied desires. That is it. The more of your own needs are fulfilled, the wealthier you are.

Money, or currency, is just a way to measure that. It is a tool for exchange, not wealth itself. Money makes wealth easier to trade, but it is not the wealth. So while money might be limited, wealth is not.

This is why printing more money does not create more wealth. It usually just leads to inflation. But because human needs are endless, every time demand increases, the process of meeting that demand becomes a form of wealth creation. No one loses in this equation. Which proves: wealth is not a zero-sum game.

Adam Smith once defined wealth as the sum of materials, labor, land, and technology. Marx focused more on the interaction between land and labor. In today’s world, wealth has clearly shifted toward labor and technology.

It is well known that materials and land are scarce. They cannot be distributed equally, and that scarcity creates zero-sum games. But people often ignore the impact of labor and technology.

Technology is not finite. It scales with human creativity. In some cases, it even amplifies labor. Whether labor itself is finite is still debatable. But based on what we see now, labor hours tend to decrease as technology advances. In that sense, labor grows with technology.

To move toward infinite creation, we need to escape the trap of thinking in terms of limits. Depreciation is one way to solve this. Land ownership is another core issue.

Thanks to the rise of the subscription model and the sharing economy, the concept of ownership is starting to shift. Instead of owning things, we now pay to use them. This change helps us focus more on creating and applying infinite resources, rather than being stuck in the mindset of managing scarce ones.

Baumol’s cost disease points to another shift. In the future, product prices will keep dropping, but services will become more expensive. The difference lies in scalability. Services are easier to replicate than goods. Some digital services even benefit from network effects, which make the cost of expansion shrink as they grow. This is why combining labor and technology to deliver services is one of the fastest ways to create wealth in our time.

In other words:** start a tech company**.

(Side note: The failure of land nationalization in the Soviet Union was due to the fact that, at the time, land and its associated labor were the primary sources of wealth. Stripping away land ownership was effectively cutting off people’s ability to accumulate wealth. And if people cannot accumulate wealth, they lose the motivation to create. The bottom line is this: the incentive to create depends on the ability to accumulate wealth. Without it, there is no drive to build.)

中文版本

我們終其一生被困在有限的框架，以為金錢等於財富，一切皆是零合。但我們忽略了資源分配同時產生的財富增長，忘記財富最根本的意義，也忽略財富本身從未稀缺的事實。

財富是什麼？財富應當等於是個體被滿足的慾望總數，一個人擁有的財富相當於他有多少的需求被滿足，僅此而已。

而金錢或是說貨幣，僅是財富量化後可被衡量的交易媒介，金錢使財富交換簡單，但它終究不是財富，因此金錢或許是有限的，但財富不是。

故創造貨幣並不等於創造財富，貨幣的增加往往造成價格的通貨膨脹，而不是總體財富的提升。但由於人類的需求永無匱乏的一天，每當需求增加時，伴隨而生的供給便是財富創造的過程。這其中不存在任何人的損失，由此也證明了世界的財富並非零和賽局的謬誤。

關於財富，亞當斯密在國富論中將其定義為物質、勞動、土地、及技術的總和，馬克思則強調土地*與勞動的交互作用，現今的財富則明顯向勞動與技術傾斜。

眾所周知，物質與土地為稀缺資源，無法分配給所有人，此種有限的資源將造就零和賽局，但人們卻忽略了技術與勞動的影響。

技術並非有限的，技術與人類的創新能量成正比，且技術的增長在某些情況也將帶動勞動的提升。現階段，勞動的有限與否存在許多辯證空間，依現有證據判斷，勞動時間將隨技術提升減少，意即勞動力本身是與技術一同成長的。

因此我們必須認知到有限的陷阱，才能邁向無限的創造，物品的折舊是一種解決方式，有限土地的所有權也是重大課題。

有賴近期興起的訂閱模式和共享經濟，我們對於事物的擁有權將脫離以往框架，取而代之是使用權的收費，此等轉變將使我們更專注在無限資源的創造和應用，而擺脫有限資源的框架。

且根據鮑爾成本病的發現，未來社會的商品價格將愈來愈低，服務的價格卻愈發提高。而服務與商品的差異在於規模化的邊際成本，服務易於複製，而商品則非，更甚者有些基資訊時代的服務有著網路效應，使得擴張的成本隨規模遞減，也因此透過技術創新與勞力提供服務，將是這個世代創造財富最快速的方式之一。

意即，科技創業。

*(註：過往蘇聯國有土地的失敗案例則在於當時財富源自土地及其衍生的勞動，因此剝奪土地的所有權相當於剝奪財富的累積，而無法累積的財富將無法驅動人類創造。總而言之，刺激創造的誘因必須是財富累積的保證，否則人將喪失追求財富的動力。)