Given the recent discussion here about minimum wage, I found Paul Graham’s “Mind the Gap” essay to be very interesting (it is an older essay, but I only just found it).

Graham writes:

In fact, wealth is not money. Money is just a convenient way of trading one form of wealth for another. Wealth is the underlying stuff—the goods and services we buy. When you travel to a rich or poor country, you don’t have to look at people’s bank accounts to tell which kind you’re in. You can see wealth—in buildings and streets, in the clothes and the health of the people.

Where does wealth come from? People make it. This was easier to grasp when most people lived on farms, and made many of the things they wanted with their own hands. Then you could see in the house, the herds, and the granary the wealth that each family created. It was obvious then too that the wealth of the world was not a fixed quantity that had to be shared out, like slices of a pie. If you wanted more wealth, you could make it.

This is just as true today, though few of us create wealth directly for ourselves (except for a few vestigial domestic tasks). Mostly we create wealth for other people in exchange for money, which we then trade for the forms of wealth we want. [1]

The essay as a whole investigates the gap between the richest people in society and the poorest, and attempts to examine the causes of that gap and whether or not that gap is itself a bad thing. It’s not entirely relevant to the discussion on minimum wage, but I think it’s interesting and that it might help some of my readers to understand where I’m coming from when I think it’s problematic to punish those who’re good at making wealth just for being better at it than other people. (Reading Harrison Bergeron might not hurt, either.)