“Which leads to the obvious conclusion, that I shouldn’t have had to take so much time to prove: The world, as a whole and in most of its individual parts, is wealthier than in was in 1900. Vastly more wealthy. Which I recognize can be disturbing to our intuition honed on the physical world. I mean, where did the wealth come from? Out of thin air? How can that be?

Interestingly, in the 19th century, scientists faced a similar problem in the physical world in dating the age of the Earth….

It was Einstein that solved the problem. E=mc2 meant that there were new processes (e.g. fusion) where very tiny amounts of mass were converted to unreasonably large amounts of energy. Amounts of energy so large that it tends to defy human intuition. Here was an enormous, really huge source of potential energy that no one before even suspected.

Which gets me back to wealth. To balance the wealth equation, there must be a huge reservoir out there of potential energy, or I guess you would call it potential wealth. This source is the human mind. All wealth flows from the human mind, and that source of energy is also unreasonably large, much larger than most people imagine”. –Coyote Blog addressing many peoples false beliefs that wealth is somehow zero sum