What is wealth?

While I was pondering on the question of "How should we think of wealth?", I came across writings by Professor Uwe E. Reinhardt from Princeton. Very interesting arguments. Here are a few that resonate with me.

"Human happiness or well being are the manifestation of wealth."

"Financial measures of wealth are always, at best, a very crude approximation of what we really try to measure."

"Measuring the economic welfare produced by a nation's economy in a given year simply by the one-dimensional index GDP is about as sensible as picking a mate from a group of candidates merely after seeing their feet. There is some information there, but not a whole lot."

"Properly defined, wealth is a summary of the future human happiness that a nation should be able to derived from the collection of land, structures, accumulated knowledge and human capital within its borders."

"The foundation of our nation's wealth turns out to be--you might never have guessed it--our mothers, our teachers in elementary and high school, and our government. ..... All of them play such an important (but uncelebrated) role in the formation of the nations' human capital--the ultimate source of any modern nation's wealth. Your Princeton (replace Princeton with any name of higher educational institution, my word) professors, for example, merely help you build some more on this human capital. We are not its chief creators."

Prof. Uwe E. Reinhart.
His writing is available on his web site