Cumulative Wealth to Resilient Wealth

Continuing to explore the ways in which technological and social change affect our relation to money…

In my last post I discussed some of the reasons people will gravitate towards collaborative non-market based production as a substitute for monetary purchases.  In this post I want to explore further how the notion of “wealth” shifts as this change proceeds.  Specifically I want to propose that our understanding of wealth will shift from a model that focuses on accumulation to a model that focuses on developing resiliency.

Cumulative Wealth is what we are all familiar with.  It is uniform fungible money that is saved and accumulated so that it can eventually be spent on future needs.  Foremost among those needs is retirement.  The conventional wisdom tells us that we need to start saving early and accumulate sufficient wealth so that eventually we can retire, at which point we will liquidate that accumulated wealth.  Hence, there are two distinct phases to life – the productive stage during which you produce more than you consume, and the consumptive (retirement) stage during which you consume more than you produce.  This dichotomy pervades the cumulative wealth model…all economic activity is either production or consumption, earning or spending…sellers need buyers and borrowers require savers.

For more information:

http://onthespiral.com/shifting-from-cumulative-wealth-to-resilient