Steve KelseyWealth and Work
Energy over time is work.
E x t = Wk
The amount of wealth created in an hour depends upon the context the work is done.
As we have seen, the wealth created by hour of work by a brick plant is less than that of an ICU fabricator because the amount of Applied Energy, our analogy for intelligence, involved in the fabrication of a brick is much lower than the energy required to produce an ICU.
Productivity
Before industrialisation the amount of intelligence that could be applied to base matter in an hour was limited to the activity of one person. Industrialisation has increased the amount of intelligence that can be applied to base matter many times over. We call this measure productivity. A highly optimised system would seek to maximise the productivity per person to increase the wealth that one person could create. Assuming equitable distribution of wealth, if everyone had a productivity ten times greater than a single person is capable of we would all be ten times wealthier. It is this increase in productivity that has allowed us to enjoy far greater wealth than our ancestors.
Productivity is a wealth multiplier.