Many people know that there is marginal effect in economics. Eating the first apple is different from eating the 10 apple. We can also imagine that if one day, you are the only one in the world and you live in Shanghai. So, although the real estate in new york also belongs to you, do you still care? I won't. The light in Times Square is broken. Can you run over and fix it? Neither will it. Why? Because you don't need the lights there, and you don't need the house there. You will suddenly find that if you don't need it, then the house is actually no different from the stone. What you need is always those things around you. So we suddenly found that wealth is composed of two parts, material and demand for material. These two aspects are indispensable. There is no demand for material things, and wealth is equal to zero. And if there is only demand and no material, wealth is equal to zero.

Therefore, preserving wealth is essentially protecting material and protecting the demand for material.

Since the beginning of this year, the United States has fallen into very serious economic problems. Mainly the subprime mortgage crisis. Behind the subprime mortgage crisis, it actually reflects the reality that Americans are getting poorer and poorer. Why are Americans poor? We know that science and technology are always advancing, labor efficiency is always accelerating, and the ability of society to create materials is always improving. Then why are you still poor? There is only one answer, that is, Americans' material demand ability has declined. I checked the history. In the 1960 s, the salary level of Americans was about $4,700/year. What about their property? The average detached house is about $4,000. Many people can spend hundreds of dollars to buy a two-bedroom house in a suburb like Long Island, new york. Now this is incredible. So at that time, Americans whose father was a worker in a car factory and whose mother was a housewife could still live a comfortable middle-class life. Nowadays, it is not easy for two full-time masters to establish a middle-class family in the traditional sense in new york. Comparing with history, we find that Americans are poor.

Lang Xianping said: Americans come to China, they earn 6, while China earns 1. This is a good point. But on second thought, most of the 6+ 1 is earned by the boss. 6+ 1=7, but this 7 is paid by the American middle class. Indeed, the expansion of world trade has created a larger economic scale and established a more effective material production capacity. However, due to the strength of the rich to the poor, the social demand for material things is also shrinking.