… is from page 480 of Deirdre McCloskey’s 2006 volume, The Bourgeois Virtues:
“Real wealth” in the economist’s way of thinking is not a pile of finished stuff merely to be allocated, as in the children’s playroom. Nor does wealth consist of those tokens of ownership such as money in your pocket or stocks in your pension plan or profits from your drug deal. Wealth is the real ability in arm or brain or machine to produce more stuff, the “real” backing for the tokens.
