Some guy once famously noted that wealth is not measured in gold or silver, but in goods and services. Mansa Musa didn't have a Ferrari F40, or an RTX4090, or air conditioning. He couldn't buy a trip to low earth orbit or get cancer treatment if he needed it. Many people in this day and age are vastly more wealthy than he was.
I visited the Biltmore Estate years ago, the home of the Vanderbilt family. It occurred to me during the tour that all the end result of all this wealth was approximately equivalent to having a 5 bedroom McMansion. A huge percentage of the sprawling property was dedicated to housing servants who performed tasks like laundry, changing the water in the (pre-chlorine) pool, taking care of the horses and carriages of visitors, or preparing meals that today are mostly completely automated or unnecessary. The end result was housing the owners and a few guests in conditions substantially worse than the average modern suburban home.
That's definitely a reasonable way to think about it. Another though is in terms of social status and ability to direct human labor, in which case most people are not more wealthy.
You rarely see modern dictators on these lists but populations and economic prosperity have exploded to the point where historic kings can’t really compete.
“social status and ability to direct human labor” doesn’t require ownership just control.
In the US congress controls in the funding, but in a dictatorship the guy at the top can unilaterally allocate billions and then manage how it’s spent. It’s not total control of all government assets but it is control of a significant fraction of a modern economy.
Just as a thought experiment, suppose he wanted to fund Doctors Without Borders or some other international charity. Do you really think he’d have trouble sending the equivalent of 1 billion USD in Chinese government funds to that org? How about 2 billion? Obviously at some point it wouldn’t work but where exactly that line is says a lot about the power he has.
That one way to measure wealth. Another would be to measure it in terms of how much labor you can get from your fellow humans. Mana Musa was far more wealthy by that measure.
Yeah, but this completely ignores the relative access to resources as others at the same time. That’s kind of the point at specifying a date for these discussions. If a cure for cancer existed during the time Musa was alive, you can rest assured he would have had access to that information and those services.
Sure Musa didn't have those things, but not because of a lack of wealth. There is no point that you could increase his wealth to such that he would be able to afford those things. It takes some amount of resources and labor to produce an air conditioner, and Musa definitely could afford those resources and labor. Likewise, you are not richer than Carnegie or Rockefeller because you happen to own a microwave, you have orders of magnitude less capability to procure resources and labor, even if you have access to a slightly different set of resources and labor. Whatever you can currently afford, they would be able to afford if they were to spend their wealth in today's markets.
But by that argument we are all dirt poor, provided humanity isn't wiped out, because future generations will have more technology than us. Which to me is kind of a worthless way to measure how wealthy anybody is.
It is if you compare yourself to other people living around you or at the same time. After all they are the ones your competing for a limited amount of resources with.
Comparing the wealth of people who lived hundreds of years ago in entirely different societies/economic systems is quite pointless, yes.
Indeed, it depends. I think the way this list works it's relative to the available resources at the time, i.e. what percentage of the available wealth did they control?
