CHAPTER 2
The Evolution of Wealth

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

—Peter Drucker

Like most childhoods, mine had its challenges. Yet I realize now that I was fortunate in my upbringing in every sense of the word. One of my earliest memories is traveling to live for a year in New York City with my mother, who was getting her master’s degree in early childhood education. For a five-year-old boy from North Carolina, learning to ice-skate on the rink at Rockefeller Center was high adventure. The memory of eating warm chestnuts bought from street vendors on cold afternoons still brings a smile. Upon our return home, my father commented that I sounded like a little Yankee. I never fully regained a southern accent. I consider my hybrid speech a memento of my unusual fortune in experiencing that happy time.

While both of my parents had achieved a great deal of success in their lives, I understood that their success was built on the economic and, in a sense, spiritual foundation laid by my grandparents. Both of my maternal grandparents were college graduates, a rarity for African Americans in the first half of the twentieth century. My grandmother, Rheba Hoffman, was a librarian and spoke fluent French. My grandfather, Guy, was a high school principal. As the owners of a Ford Model T and a house that they had built themselves on 41 acres of Tennessee property, they were solid citizens of a growing middle class. Rheba used her Singer sewing machine, a staple of small business opportunities discussed later in the chapter, to make and repair clothes. Together, my grandparents grew crops, raised an assortment of pigs and chickens, and hired help to manage their household and land. They considered themselves well-off by any standard. As African Americans in the South during the 1930s, they were exceptionally secure.

At that time, many people, especially black people, could rarely afford to fill their car’s gas tank. Even if you could afford to buy a car, being able to afford to drive it was another matter. A favorite family story—retold by a friend who, as a teenager, had pumped gas in town—recounted a day when my grandfather pulled up to the gas station in his Model T. The young service attendant asked Principal Hoffman how much gas he wanted in the tank. My grandfather then inquired how much the tank would hold. When the reply was, “About 10 gallons,” he promptly declared, “Well, fill it up, boy! Fill it up!” The story got many laughs, but we also got the message—my grandfather was a prosperous man.

Yet if the Hoffmans of the 1930s were to walk into a typical middle-class suburban home today, they might well feel something akin to awe. They might even believe they’d arrived in a small palace owned by people of fabulous means. The home’s central heating and air-conditioning, washer and dryer, refrigerator, freezer, dishwasher, multiple TVs, computers, microwave ovens, and automatic sprinklers—not to mention several cars—would signal one thing: extreme financial wealth.

The contrast between my grandparents’ good life and many Americans’ lives today illustrates an interesting phenomenon—namely, that our definition of wealth is constantly changing. This is true not only in the United States, but in all cultures and countries of the world. The lifestyle and possessions that we take for granted today as almost the birthright of a twenty-first-century American would have been unthinkable even for a land baron of the nineteenth century. We can also predict with some certainty that the items that we consider luxuries today will be viewed as ordinary conveniences tomorrow. For example, when I was a young child in the 1950s, most families aspired to have a single TV in the living room. Today, it’s not uncommon to find TVs in the living room, kitchen, family room, and most bedrooms in a single house. A “home theater,” once the privilege of elite homeowners and Hollywood moguls, has now become almost commonplace in suburban America.

The fluidity of what wealth means to us—both as individuals and as a society—shows that wealth and our expectations of its rewards are in the eye of the beholder. The yardstick for measuring wealth keeps evolving. The manner in which European settlers in America accumulated and viewed wealth changed dramatically during the Industrial Revolution. When the Information Age arrived, the means and measurements of wealth evolved yet again. The common denominator, however, remains the same: a deep desire to make a better life.

The yardstick for measuring wealth keeps evolving.

The Era of Basic Necessities

I consider my grandparents to have been pioneers in a distinctly American tradition. Their determination to own land, depend on themselves, and create a prosperous life reflects the desires and courage that lie at the heart of an American ideal. It was these very desires that drove the earliest European immigrants to leave the comfort and certainty of their known world and come to a New World that was utterly unfamiliar and potentially hostile. My own ancestors first came to these shores for different reasons and under drastically different circumstances. Yet it was the profound universality of these dreams of self-determination that led my ancestors to work so hard to fulfill those dreams—once they had the opportunity to do so.

My ancestors’ experiences, and the contrasts I can observe in the relatively brief time since my grandparents’ coming of age, have piqued my curiosity. How and why have we as a society traveled so far and so quickly? Are there lessons about the psychology of wealth to be gleaned from that journey?

Many of the Europeans who crossed the ocean were seeking the opportunity to chart a new life course, free from the authority of the monarchies back home. Being able to farm land of their own, to hunt, to feed their families, and to worship as they chose represented a significant step up in the quality of their lives. The freedom they found is an example of a type of wealth that is timeless and priceless in all cultures.

Yet we know that for the first 150 years or so, life for these settlers and their descendants was difficult and sometimes even deadly. Many conveniences had been available to people in Europe, even those in the poorer segments of society. In this strange new land, simply meeting life’s basic requirements was a daily challenge. Many people suddenly found themselves measuring their position in life on the most primal of scales: by their ability to secure food, shelter, and physical safety. The line between life and death sometimes depended on a turn in the weather and, as a result, a potential failure of the food supply. For this reason, the long period of America’s early economic development—from around 1607 to 1790—may best be described as the “era of basic necessities.” For most people, mastery of the land and its fruits were the benchmarks of individual success—and survival.

The Land of Opportunity = The Opportunity for Land

In the New World’s developing agrarian economy, as in much of the Old World, land ownership offered the best opportunity for achieving a measure of prosperity. Most people relied on farming for their livelihood and for opportunities for financial growth. Some also traded with Native Americans or exported goods to Europe. But for the average individual, prosperity meant owning a home and growing enough food to feed one’s family, and perhaps also having a few head of livestock. A horse and buggy to haul oneself and one’s supplies into and out of town was a necessity as well. Having more than one horse and extra crops to sell equaled abundance.

America has long been considered a land of opportunity, and for good reason. While most new Americans sustained themselves in traditional ways, the source of greatest wealth was the ownership of large amounts of land. The vast amounts of undeveloped land in the Americas held nearly limitless opportunities for privileged families. The holders of the largest tracts, the gentry of the New World, had the benefit of being able to produce excess food and secure the services of indentured workers. This excess production enabled the first accumulation of financial wealth in the New World.

This New World gentry was made up of Europeans who had been given the rights to huge tracts of land in the colonies. The governments of England, the Netherlands, and Spain bought or took hundreds of thousands of acres from Native Americans and granted them to families and individuals with high status or influence in Europe. Charters were also granted to business ventures, such as the Massachusetts Bay Company, whose activities could benefit the mother country. The beneficiaries of these grants had full authority over the income created from their stewardship of the land (although they were also heavily taxed by the mother country), and their wealth grew exponentially. In some of the eastern colonies established by England, this arrangement gave these landed families and their heirs the rights to own, sell, inherit, or will their land, and to buy additional land from others.

The climate of the southern colonies was conducive to developing large farms and plantations. As the population of the American colonies grew, agriculture prevailed in the South, and commerce progressed more readily in the North. Relying on slave labor, southern planters expanded production and, with it, their fortunes. In the antebellum South, aristocratic lifestyles emerged. Wealth was blossoming in America for these flourishing landowners.

As settlements in the American colonies continued to grow and cities developed, a second wave of well-connected immigrants arrived. Initially settling in the Northeast, some of these privileged immigrants founded commercial and investment banks, trading companies, and other businesses that eventually produced tremendous riches. To preserve their power and influence, these new Americans formed partnerships and business alliances that kept their money and holdings within their immediate families, or at least within a close circle of friends. These financial giants would eventually help fund the American Revolution and, later, the Civil War. Their vast financial holdings exemplified extreme wealth and power in the first two centuries of New World growth.

In early America, there were wide economic gaps between large landholders and those who worked the land, but the desire for self-determination that had brought many of the first immigrants to this hemisphere was already having its influence. This desire was to drive America’s economic future and spark the world-shaking political upheaval of the American Revolution. The fulfillment of this desire by many new Americans was laying the foundation for the unique philosophy that still underlies the nation’s collective consciousness: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

From Land to Mass Production: The Industrial Revolution

With the Americans’ victory in the Revolutionary War in 1783, the last remnants of the old political and economic influences of Europe gave way, and the first stages of a uniquely American era of wealth and prosperity began to take shape. In this new democracy, virtually anyone had the opportunity to create wealth.

This period was also the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, when the ways in which wealth was made and measured changed radically. Between 1790 and the 1830s, wealth began to take on a new identity in both the United States and Europe, as the world witnessed the triumph of a middle class of industrialists and businessmen. In America, as these men grew in affluence, they assumed positions of power and influence that previously had been limited to the landed class of nobility and aristocracy. Although only a relative few achieved this type of wealth, the growth of prosperity in America was tremendous.

The American Industrial Revolution began with the opening of the first industrial cotton mill in 1790. Samuel Slater built the mill in Rhode Island with machinery designed on a British model. Within 10 years, at least 50 other Slater-style mills were operating in the United States, greatly increasing textile production. An early form of outsourcing supported this expansion: small pieces of textile work were performed in people’s homes. This new approach to organizing the workload was the forerunner of the factory system, in which workers performed large amounts of work in a single facility. Many of the workers in this new environment were women, who, in the process, gained more independence from the family farm.

In the United States, the transition from an agricultural and mercantile economy to an industrial one took more than a century. Industrial advancement in America lagged somewhat behind that in Great Britain because of the immense amount of land requiring development, coupled with a relative shortage of labor. However, with the advent of American innovations in transportation, manufacturing, and machinery, the U.S. economy steadily progressed and soon caught up, and a new age of productivity was born. With it came a much higher standard of living for many people.

The Era of Basic Conveniences

Yet another change would be needed, however, to support the growth of this new economy, and that change was in credit. More sources of credit—and, with it, capital—became necessary to help businesses develop. By 1805, the Bank of the United States, chartered by Congress in 1791 at Alexander Hamilton’s urging, had opened offices in eight major cities and was financing fledgling businesses. After Congress failed to renew the federal bank’s charter in 1811, state governments continued to establish banks; within five years, they had launched more than 200 state-chartered banks and had taken on the responsibility for funding the growth of business. This created a swift and necessary increase of credit for the economy. Unfortunately, not all the banks were properly regulated; this poor oversight created an economic crisis that led to a depression in 1819.¹ America went from galloping expansion to its first major economic depression, the likes of which wouldn’t be experienced again until the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s. However, this crisis provided a valuable lesson: to benefit society, growth and debt must be managed wisely.

To benefit society, growth and debt must be managed wisely.

Fast Forward to 2008

As most of us are keenly aware, in 2008, failures of major banks and insurance companies sparked an economic crisis that brought credit markets to a grinding halt. A series of collapses in the mortgage industry also contributed to the financial ruin of millions. The effects of these failures and the crisis in confidence rippled through much of the world, causing even more economic damage and hardship.² Had we not learned the lessons of earlier hard times?

A Story of Personal Circumstances

The pastoral setting of Bill and Deb Mann’s home, on the banks of the Cumberland River in Tennessee, might lead you to believe that you had stepped back in time. Set on a hill, the house, with a big screened porch, overlooks the river and a garden with irises and butterfly bushes. “It’s so peaceful here,” Deb says. “It is like breathing in the nectar of God.”

But like many others in the United States, Bill and Deb’s house is being repossessed. Even with Deb’s nine years of experience in real estate development, they weren’t able to get ahead of the crash. It’s been tough, but Deb and Bill feel that they have learned a lot. They believe theirs is a story of personal circumstances, some of which were extraordinary and some of which were shared by many other people. Bill explained, “When the economic collapse occurred, we lost all of our real estate investments. Then a 500-year flood hit our hometown. It damaged our home and completely took out my mom’s house. Then my mom became ill.”

This isn’t the way they would like to have written their story, but they are learning to get their finances in order, and they know they’ll get through it. They have started a small business, and Bill continues to work as a musician. He concludes, “It’s about perseverance. It has been stressful, but there are still blessings. People in the community have helped rebuild my mother’s house, and we’ll all be moving in there soon.” He’s optimistic about the future. Despite our society’s collective amnesia about previous hard times, history tells us that he’s right to feel that way.

So what caused the economic near-meltdown that was felt from Wall Street to the Cumberland River and to many other hillsides and streets in the United States? Nobel laureate Paul Krugman believes that “Regulation didn’t keep up with the system.”³ In the balancing act of uninhibited expansion and judicious oversight, we have clearly been dropping a few balls. To figure out how we might pick them up again and, in the process, create better personal relationships with money, a closer look at credit is needed.

Prosperity for All

Historically, the ability to borrow money has often been a privilege that was restricted to the wealthy. Borrowing allowed people who already had money to borrow more in order to make investments, which often made them wealthier. For the growth of the American economy, it was important that many more people should have access to such mainstream credit. The opening of bank credit to middle-class business owners played a key role in the expansion of American prosperity. Without credit, whole groups of people would have remained locked in a type of caste system from which it was difficult, if not impossible, to escape.

As the doors to lending and borrowing opportunities opened wider, middle-class Americans were better able to start and support businesses, resulting in greater prosperity for all. This also marked the beginning of a more modern view of borrowing and lending. These activities lost their stigma when money was lent to business owners who used it to move ahead in life. “Credit is the vital air of the system of modern commerce,” Daniel Webster wrote in 1834. “It has done more, a thousand times, to enrich nations than all the mines of all the world.”

This kind of financing proceeded briskly at all levels of the industrial economy. Yet new forms of credit were needed to enable the further expansion of American prosperity. Between 1840 and 1890, these changes began to take place with the expansion of consumer lending. Before that time, borrowing for reasons other than investment was frowned upon. Obtaining credit to buy items for individual consumption was considered an indulgence—something done merely to satisfy personal desire. This kind of borrowing was called “consumptive credit.” In contrast, loans to purchase such items as farm machinery could be justified as “productive credit”—that is, purchases that would contribute to income rather than depreciate over time.

But in 1856, the perception and function of consumer borrowing began to change. A revolution in the way Americans live had begun—with the humble sewing machine. The Singer Sewing Machine Company introduced its retail installment credit plan. The program was clear and catchy: “a dollar down, a dollar a week” to buy a sewing machine on credit and repay the loan. Right away, this credit plan allowed a great many more families to purchase sewing machines.

This simple program was a powerful spur to the advancement of the middle class and the further rise of prosperity in America. Many women’s diaries from that period portray sewing by hand as one of the most time-consuming of domestic tasks. The Singer machine dramatically reduced the time required for this activity. For example, the time needed to make a shirt dropped from fourteen hours to just one. This new efficiency allowed enterprising housewives to take on activities that earned money—up to a dollar a day. Since the sewing machine cost a dollar a week, the debt was highly productive and greatly enhanced the women’s prosperity. Some women made names for themselves through their refined and original efforts, and the machines provided many women with a type of freedom they hadn’t known before.

A Peach in South Carolina

Margaret Campbell Bailey was born in Ruby, South Carolina, in 1925. She is called Peachie, both for the peach grove in which she grew up and for the healthy pink color of her cheeks. Peachie reminisces, “It was hard times back then, but my mother was smart. She never let us know we were poor.” Peachie’s mother was also enterprising. While staying at home with her children, she earned extra money by sewing clothing for other people. Peachie says, “To make a dress, she got 25 cents. My mother made everything we wore from top to bottom. The only thing I don’t think Mama made was Daddy’s Sunday clothes. But she did make the white suit my sister got married in. She sewed it from the bags that held the soda we bought for the crops. When washed and starched, that cloth was like fine linen. It was beautiful.

“That sewing machine was in the house from the time I can remember. They bought it with installment payments, because no one had enough money to buy a sewing machine outright back then.”

One Easter, nine-year-old Peachie didn’t have an Easter dress. “My mother had surgery, and afterward they wouldn’t let her pedal a machine for a while. I cried because this meant I wouldn’t have an Easter dress. Mama told me that if I would do the pedaling, she would help me. She showed me how to lay out her homemade pattern, and I cut the pieces out of washed and pressed feedsack cloth. Mama sat beside me and put the pieces together. Then she would say, ‘Now sew that.’ I made my dress, and I have been sewing ever since.”

When Sacony Sewing Company opened mills in South Carolina, Peachie went to work for them. “Later, when I went back to working for myself, I sewed for three ladies who worked at Prudential, Western Electric, and Gifford Mills. Ladies were coming up in the workplace and needed dresses for work. I charged 10 dollars per dress and could make four to five dresses per day. It was hard work, with 10- to 12-hour days, but I was making pretty good money. I’ve done pretty well for myself.”

And the Singer Sewing Machine Company? It did more than any other business or institution to bring the installment plan to the world. In the process, the company grew to be among the first multinational corporations.

Prospecting for Prosperity

Anne Norton’s great-great-grandfather was the first salesman of Singer sewing machines in Louisville, Kentucky. Anne still has the first sewing machine the family bought when he worked for Singer. Its walnut case and heavy cast-iron work are things of beauty. After the Civil War, women who had lost their husbands during the war headed west to seek better prospects. In the American West in the late nineteenth century, there was little ready-made clothing. Women saw their sewing machines as passports to greater prosperity. Their machines provided them not only with financial security, but with more value for prospective husbands. For many women, a Singer sewing machine had become the most prized of possessions. Among other benefits to western women, the machines, along with mail-order patterns and fabrics, assured them that they could be as fashionable as their sisters in the eastern cities they had left behind.⁴

In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, installment credit programs similar to Singer’s were rapidly adopted to sell other useful household items.⁵ With these loan programs, the window of opportunity opened for average citizens to make purchases and upgrade their living standards in ways that had previously been out of reach.⁶ Ownership of certain durable goods—sewing machines, fine furniture, and large machinery to work a farm—was regarded as a means to progress in life in material ways.⁷

I was also surprised to learn about the piano’s role in this progress to prosperity. Historically, owning a piano had been a privilege restricted to royalty. Even as piano prices came down, they were not affordable for anyone but the aristocracy. Installment credit plans changed that. And when pianos became accessible to ordinary wage earners, the instrument’s popularity soared. Having a piano provided a sense of gentility in a frontier environment. Everywhere in America, piano ownership represented solid citizenship in the middle class.

Sammy Kicklighter, of Brevard, North Carolina,⁸ is a purveyor of pianos and an amateur historian of the instrument. He explained that in the late 1800s, “a piano offered both refinement and at-home entertainment when there was little such diversion otherwise. If you could afford a piano, the implication was that you were in the company of kings. It gave prestige to the family. With the introduction of player pianos and smaller uprights, the country saw a virtual piano boom.” In 1850, fewer than 50,000 pianos were manufactured worldwide. Between 1890 and 1928, U.S. sales of pianos ranged from 172,000 to 364,000 per year.⁹ Installment credit plans brought pianos to Americans, and more Americans to the installment plan.¹⁰

Henry Ford Changes the World

Enter the automobile. Henry Ford didn’t invent cars, but he brought them within the economic reach of large numbers of people. In the process, he changed just about everything in American life. Charles Sorensen joined Henry Ford as an executive at Ford Motor Company while Ford was designing the Model T. Sorensen described how he was brought to a secret room at the company. “Early one morning in the winter of 1906–07, Henry Ford dropped in at the pattern department of the Piquette Avenue plant to see me. ‘Come with me, Charlie,’ he said, ‘I want to show you something.’ I followed him to the third floor and… he looked about and said, ‘Charlie, I’d like to have a room finished off right here in this space.’” Ford described his requirements for the utmost secrecy for the room that would hold the blueprints and patents for the car. Sorensen said, “It became the maternity ward for Model T.”¹¹

Although Ford did everything he could to keep the Model T affordable, it still cost almost a year’s salary for most people. And so a new arena of commerce was born—third-party automobile finance companies. By 1925, as much as 75 percent of cars were being purchased on an installment plan. Credit financing was again shortening the road to upward mobility for the middle class.

With the Industrial Revolution, the yardstick for measuring prosperity in the average home had again changed. In addition to owning middle-class status symbols, such as a piano, a family’s ability to pay others to produce their food and their basic necessities—and the leisure time provided by machines of all kinds—signified that the family had earned its piece of the American dream. By the twentieth century, the United States had completed its geographical expansion into the immense western lands and was looking to a future that promised endless economic development. During this time, the United States also began to take on a leadership role in world trade and industry.

With the rapid escalation of the Information Age, prosperity now looks unlike any of its previous incarnations.

Wealth in the Information Age—The Era of Basic Luxuries

In the last few decades, our measuring stick for wealth in America has stretched yet again—and almost as dramatically as it did during the Industrial Revolution. With the rapid escalation of the Information Age, prosperity now looks unlike any of its previous incarnations. Indeed, the lifestyle that a contemporary American might consider merely comfortable surpasses what a colonial family would have deemed fabulous wealth. In many ways, the twenty-first-century Joneses’ minimum requirements would be unimaginable even to John Jacob Astor, considered to be the richest man in America when he died in 1848. Perhaps even more striking is the fact that many aspects of our lifestyle today would seem like a fantasy to the American Joneses of even several decades ago.

Much of this shift is due to the explosion of technology over the last 30 years. Today, virtually no one in America or in many other parts of the world lives without a cell phone, a device that was seen only in science fiction not long ago. Powerful and portable personal computers, including smartphones, are nearly ubiquitous. These devices, along with high-speed Internet access and the almost limitless power it gives individuals to connect, create, learn, and earn, have revolutionized the way we live—and our expectations for wealth.

Today, for most “middle-class” citizens of the world, homeownership is a mark of prosperity. Although the United States is experiencing a mortgage crisis, it remains a prosperous nation. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, 67 percent of Americans own the home in which they live. The National Association of Home Builders found that the average home size in the United States had expanded to 2,700 square feet in 2009, which was 1,400 square feet more than the size of an average home in 1970. Most middle-class Americans, Time reported, not only hold a mortgage but have a “professional or managerial job that earns them somewhere between $30,000 and $100,000 a year.”¹² In addition, 70 percent also “have cable and two or more cars. Two-thirds have high-speed Internet, and forty percent own a flat-screen TV. They have several credit cards each and a lot of luxury goods.” Yet tellingly, most members of America’s middle class “still believe that others have more than they do.”¹³ For most people, prosperity includes not only the assets described above, but also the ability to travel by air for business and leisure, a modest savings account, a retirement plan, and life and health insurance. Friends and good health round out the picture of what most Americans consider a satisfactory degree of happiness and material comfort. Affluence only begins with these fundamentals and might also include a vacation home, private schooling for their kids, exotic travel, ever-renewed wardrobe and jewelry, a generous retirement plan, lucrative investments, and so on.

Today, what we now consider basic necessities—such as washers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, and cars—are within the reach of most Americans, even many of those whom the U.S. Census Bureau classifies as “poor.” The widespread ownership of these items showcases a welcome rise in our overall standard of living. And yet it raises a question: has the perpetual stretching of the yardstick for prosperity distorted our expectation of what a satisfactory lifestyle should include?

In part, this stretch reflects our innate human desire to grow and reach beyond ourselves—and in several ways we are growing and evolving at an unprecedented rate. As this growth occurs, the challenge is to become more conscious of our own hopes, dreams, and actions. This means, in part, not being swept up by the cultural drive to own and spend more—specifically, more than we can handle while maintaining a balanced and prosperous life.

Some of this growth in the yardstick for wealth is certainly caused by a bombardment of media messages that are not necessarily in our best interest. We are assailed daily with advertisements for newer, better, and sexier cars, gadgets, and conveniences. We are exhorted to vacation in faraway places, dine out every night, and generally accumulate more and more. We are told how we should feel, smell, eat, drink, look, and play. If we don’t feel as fabulous—or live as well—as the radiantly smiling people on TV, we’re told what drug we can take to make ourselves feel better. While advertising is an essential engine of the economy of most developed nations, its messages can act as distractions.

Yet we have taken the bait. Many people have been accumulating possessions at an alarming rate, using credit to build a house of cards. Debt is massive and climbing, and it threatens to wreak havoc on our individual and collective lives. Has credit, one of the developments that helped create wealth in America and other parts of the world, somehow become a bad thing? As I researched and learned more about what is happening to global and individual prosperity today, and where we’ve come from, answering this question became more critical in my mind. It is clear that credit is as vital for prosperity and for national and individual growth as it has ever been. Without it, our economy would come to a crashing halt. So what’s the answer? I needed to learn more.

In the meantime, it was not difficult to see that people need more from life than lots of possessions and lots of money. According to a 2010 analysis, the three wealthiest cities in the world are New York, London, and Paris. This analysis was based on four indexes that measure economic vitality, political influence, research ability, and standard of living. Yet, surprisingly, the countries with the happiest citizens don’t include any of these cities. The Better Life Index, created by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), measures countries by categories that include housing, income, community, education, environment, governance, health, life satisfaction, and other factors. Based on these categories, Australia and Canada are tied for having the happiest residents. The next four countries, in order, are New Zealand, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.¹⁴

In 2009, the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index showed that New York, the wealthiest city in the world, was not even among the top 10 happiest U.S. cities. The happiest was Boulder, Colorado, an economically modest burg in comparison.¹⁵ The good life is clearly about far more than having and spending. True prosperity and happiness are obviously tied to the intangibles of life.

The Next Evolution

From the twists and turns of history, I had learned that wealth is a fluid concept. Our view of the good life has changed and evolved around the world, which is good news for us as individuals. If the definition of wealth is changeable, it implies that we have the opportunity to discover and define what wealth means to us personally—and to take steps to achieve it.

We want more from life—and the things we want cannot be put on our credit cards. Commercials tell us that certain aspects of life are priceless, but what does that really mean? Ultimately, it is up to us as individuals to find the meaning of prosperity, and that takes conscious consideration. If there’s something more to happiness and prosperity than financial assets, each of us must consider the question: what is my personal yardstick for wealth, and how did I come by it? We will attempt to solve these puzzles on our way to discovering how to find and fulfill our own dreams of prosperity.