Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II WEALTH AND WELL-BEING Prosperity and wealth. The study of national prosperity must necessarily lead to a study of such things as wealth and well-being. Prosperity consists in getting an adequate supply of those things called wealth and in utilizing them wisely. When we have secured an adequate supply of those things we have the means of well-being. When we have utilized them wisely we have achieved well-being. The material objects which we try to get and to utilize are called wealth. What are economic goods ? Before we can go very far in our study of getting and utilizing, or of production and consumption, we must get a clear idea of the sort of things that men try to produce or to get. When it was stated in the last chapter that the necessity for economy arose out of the fact of scarcity, it might have been guessed at once that scarcity has a great deal to do with our concept of wealth and with our efforts to produce it. At any rate the only things we try to produce are the things of which we do not have enough. These are the things about which we are anxious. The very first step toward a true understanding of the nature of wealth, then, is a clear perception that wealth, in the economic sense, consists of things that are scarce and therefore need to be economized. Some very useful things are very abundant, however,-—so abundant that everyone can have all he wants. Such things do not have to be economized, hence they are not economic goods. Only those things are economic goods which have to be economized; that is, which are scarce. Two meanings of wealth. Now the word "wealth" has two meanings. In the first place, it is the collective name for all economic goods, or for all goods that have to be economized; thatis, for goods that are scarce. In the second p...