The Scandal of Singular Wealth
Wealth today is built on an illusion. The illusion is that it is singular.
In my previous essay, Why Wealth Intelligence Without Leaving Wealth Management, I argued that wealth intelligence begins where management ends — with the capacity to see and steward wealth across multiple forms, not just money.
This piece is its companion. If the first essay was about the promise of wealth intelligence, this one is about the scandal that makes it necessary.
The grotesque paradoxes we ignore
A billionaire boards his Gulfstream but misses his daughter’s recital.
A CEO rings the bell at IPO but finds no one left in her marriage.
A nation posts record GDP while its suicide rates climb.
We are rich in digits, poor in life.
The numbers go up while the humans break down.
We built a cathedral of wealth.
Then we collapsed it into a single crude measurement.
Simon Kuznets, father of GDP, warned in 1934: “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income.”
We knew this. We forgot.
Trophime Bigot, 1640, Allegory of Vanity
The invisible portfolio
Every leader already manages a portfolio — just not the one that matters.
We obsess over equities, bonds, real estate. But the true determinant of flourishing is the existential portfolio — nine forms of capital across three realms:
Life Force (vitality, energy)
Emotional (capacity for resilience, balance)
Spiritual (meaning, coherence, transcendence)
Relational (trust, intimacy, belonging)
Social (networks, community, reputation)
Time (presence, attention, unbought hours)
Financial (digits, assets, liquidity)
Intellectual (knowledge, learning, perspective)
Creative (imagination, renewal, originality)
Wealth is not a number.
It is a portfolio-as-life.
Nine is no accident — Miller’s Law (1956) shows we can hold ~7±2 categories in working memory. Systems theory (Markowitz, 1952) shows diversification benefits plateau around 8–10. Nine is the sweet spot.
The nine are not commandments. Different societies weight them differently — some elevate community, others autonomy, others ecology.
But wealth is plural by design. For everyone.
The law of mispriced wealth
Financial Capital is convertible. Time Capital is not.
That’s why money is never enough.
You can buy houses, vacations, even outsourced chores —
but not another hour of life, not another moment of presence, not another chance to be there.
Time affluence predicts well-being more strongly than material affluence (Kasser & Sheldon, 2009).
Buying time, not things, increases happiness (Whillans et al., 2016).
And yet our dashboards obsessively track the convertible while ignoring the irretrievable.
The capitals we refuse to measure
Time Capital: OECD (2020) recognizes time poverty as inequality as real as income.
Creative Capital: Neuroscience shows creativity is distinct from intelligence (Beaty et al., 2016).
Relational & Emotional Capital: Strong ties predict survival better than quitting smoking (Holt-Lunstad et al., 2010).
We measure EBITDA and ignore exhaustion.
We mint unicorns and starve imagination.
We deplete forests and corrode trust.
The cathedral cracks.
The commons collapses.
Inequality’s deeper wound
It is not only that some have more Financial Capital than others.
It is that extreme concentration erodes every other form of capital:
Inequality shortens life expectancy, fractures trust, and fuels political instability (Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009).
When financial power concentrates, creative, social, and ecological commons wither under extraction.
The scandal is not only singular wealth.
It is singular wealth weaponized.
Stop. Run our balance sheet.
Forget net worth for a moment. Let’s rate ourselves 1–10 on three capitals:
Life Force (our vitality)
Time (our presence with people we love)
Creativity (our ability to generate, imagine, renew)
Which is lowest? That’s where our existential portfolio is bleeding.
Now scale it up: rate our communities. Trust. Ecological care. Shared creativity.
Which is lowest? That’s where the commons is collapsing.
From scandal to strategy
Dashboards don’t save us if they measure the wrong thing.
Leaders who measure only money are managing fragility.
Leaders who steward all nine capitals are managing resilience, meaning, and legacy.
Scientific sidebar:
Stiglitz–Sen–Fitoussi (2009) urged multidimensional well-being dashboards.
OECD’s How’s Life? report (2020) does the same.
Psychology, sociology, systems science all converge on one truth: resilience depends on plural wealth, not singular digits.
Flow principle: When capitals align, humans enter flow — creativity, vitality, joy compound.
Upward spirals: Positive emotion builds enduring resources; emotional capital multiplies across portfolios.
The scandal exposed
The scandal is not that money is unevenly distributed.
The scandal is that we ever believed money was enough.
What the Wealth?! It’s time to break the spell. To imagine portfolios not of digits alone, but of life itself — vitality, relationships, creativity, time.
What if we measured and managed these with the same rigor we apply to EBITDA?
Would the commons regenerate as a result?
Because the richest person alive is still bankrupt — if they’ve sold off their hours, their relationships, their vitality, their imagination, and their planet.
Future shock
If we continue crowning Financial Capital as supreme, here’s what awaits:
Rising GDP, shrinking trust.
Unicorn valuations, hollowed-out families.
Wealth concentrated in digits, while life and ecology both deplete.
The next crisis won’t be financial.
It will be existential.
The bridge to Wealth Intelligence
This is not wealth management.
This is wealth intelligence — the art and science of stewarding a portfolio that includes life, time, relationships, creativity, vitality, and trust.
Within the twin pillars of civilizational resilience — peace and wealth — peace cannot endure without plural wealth, and wealth cannot survive if we continue to crown Financial Capital as supreme.
The cathedral must be rebuilt.
The choice is simple
The scandal of singular wealth is systemic.
But it is also personal.
Every one of us is either complicit or courageous.
Which will we be?
What the wealth koan:
If wealth is more than money, what belongs in our portfolio?
And what happens to the commons if we fail to ask?
References & Resonances
This essay stands on many shoulders.
Some warned us early. Some measured what we refused to see. Some reminded us that wealth was never singular.
Simon Kuznets (1934) — the father of GDP, already warning against mistaking income for welfare.
Stiglitz, Sen, Fitoussi (2009) — urging dashboards of well-being beyond digits.
OECD (2020) — naming time poverty as inequality as real as income.
Thomas Piketty (2013) — showing how concentrated capital corrodes societies.
Mariana Mazzucato (2018) — asking who decides what counts as value.
Elinor Ostrom (1990) — proving the commons can be governed together.
Wilkinson & Pickett (2009) — mapping how inequality fractures health and trust.
Holt-Lunstad et al. (2010) — showing social ties predict survival better than quitting smoking.
Beaty et al. (2016) — revealing creativity as distinct from intelligence.
Miller (1956) & Markowitz (1952) — reminding us why nine is the sweet spot.
Their research provides scaffolding.
The scandal is ours to confront.