I don't think I see the point of this. First, I can't see treating 'health' and 'wealth' synonymously. Suppose you were in solitary confinement, fed three bland but nutritious meals a day, and had an hour a day in the exercise yard, you would be healthy, but would you say you were wealthy?
Let's begin with the simplest Venn diagram.
https://d2gne97vdumgn3.cloudfront.net/api/file/RXqIbx54RTKarFp7Bv4FIn the leftmost circle section write the word health. In the rightmost circle section, write the word wealth. In the center section of overlapping circles, write a question mark. Under that question mark place an H. H, here stands for "hybrid concept". Cats can't breed with dogs, but take a moment to imaginatively visionalize what the outcome may look like if a rat terrier bred with an abyssinian cat.
Tough, isn't it!
Now imagine that wealth and health have much more in common than this rat terrier and this abyssinian. (They most certainly do!) What you're beginning to do here is to re-frame both terms in the middle section of the Venn diagram. The trick here is to allow each term to
modify the others a little, to re-contextualize it, to bring it into another meaning which is both health and wealth.
This task is impossible if the concept of wealth you're employing is very shallow, rigid and narrow. And it's NOT EASY to make something shallow deep, something rigid supple, something narrow wide. It's an act of imagination -- but what we're imagining here is not something like a fiction, a unicorn, say. We're imagining what's really there in order to see what is really there.
In this context, let's examine the typical bundle of carrots we find in our grocery store today in relation to the typical carrot found in a grocery store in 1950.
fruits and vegetables grown decades ago were much richer in vitamins and minerals than the varieties most of us get today. The main culprit in this disturbing nutritional trend is soil depletion: Modern intensive agricultural methods have stripped increasing amounts of nutrients from the soil in which the food we eat grows. Sadly, each successive generation of fast-growing, pest-resistant carrot is truly less good for you than the one before.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-and-nutrition-loss/
Through profit-driven breeding practices and profit-driven farming practices much of our food has become less beneficial to us, less nutritious. Less "healthy" (conducive to sustaining our well-being, our health). The soil is less valuable than it once was. The food is less valuable than it once was.
if "value" in this context is roughly equivalent to wealth, we're all less wealthy than we once were because of these practices meant to
produce wealth.
Our pursuit of wealth, more often than not, results in a reduction of wealth. Once you get that basic concept you can then examine most anything in our society and economy and find out whether and how this same thing is happening in that context. It will shock your pants off if you look carefully. These are not a few isolated incidents but a whole way of life. "Death culture".
Secondly, in usual talk, people call people "wealthy" if they have the money to buy the things that (they think) will make them happy, and "poor" if they can't. I take it you want people to stop thinking that way.
... and
talking that way...
Actually, no. Not in everyday, ordinary life. Not yet. I think that will come if the paradigm shift continues to unfold and deepen. In the mean while, just expect that the word "wealth" is much less clear in its meaning than it was yesterday. Or last year. Or fifty years ago.
What I'm doing here is
enriching the concept of wealth by attempting to remove it from its
abstract context and to set the concept back down in the actual world in which we live--this
concrete world. A thing is abstract, in the philosophical sense, when it doesn't exist in the world of time and space. It is concrete when it does. I'm talking about
concrete wealth, and that breaks all the unwritten rules about wealth which economists and politicians (etc.) prefer us to utilize.
It's one of the many ironies here that when I speak of concrete wealth, as defined above, I seem to be making something very tangible less tangible! After all, Adam Smith's "wealth"
seems to be as tangible as could be! No one could doubt that potatoes and barns and houses are both
tangible and
of utility (which two components is the essence of Smith's concept of wealth). But there is a method, and reason, for my madness! As a careful observer and student of human ecology, ecological philosophy and ecological design over many decades, when I brought (and bring) my conceptual tool kit to things happening in our real, concrete, tangible world
I keep seeing the same damn thing wherever I look! One begins to notice a freaking pattern after a while. And the pattern is this:
We modern, contemporary people, caught as we are in the fact and ideology of hyper-capitalism (a.k.a., hyperindustrialism) have been plundering wealth as well-being like there's no tomorrow. More often than not, we are reducing the well-being of living systems -- personal/individual (our own bodies),
ecosystems (ecological, environmental), social (social health/well-being), emotional, aesthetic, spiritual.... Anything we are apt to call good or valuable is at risk or is being severely eroded in the name of "wealth production" -- and it's about time for us to open our eyes and see what the hell is really going on here in the name of creating wealth!
We went so far astray because we have cultural blinders on. It worked out relatively okay for a while to use Smith's version of "wealth" as a guide, but now the consequences are much too severe to be ignored. Let's stop ignoring it then! I'm attacking the heart of the matter here.
I want to pull those blinders off and show the naked world as it is. After all, we cannot honestly address a problem we cannot comprehend.
When I talk about "the naked world, just as it really is" I am talking not about objects, usually -- which are real but only in a secondary sort of way. I'm asking you to see everything as processes and flows, movement and relation. Processes and relations. This is my ontological frame of reference. For me, processes and relations are primary, central. Objects are real on in that they are fundamentally a matter of processes and relations. This is why when I speak of "the concrete" in relation to "the abstract" I sound a bit mad. When I look at a thing, I see a flow. Flows reveal a crucial aspect of relations. All things are processes and relations. (Smith, being an Early Modern, would not know what I mean.)
Also, I take disciplinary boundaries in knowledge fields as, at best, a heuristic device. All useful knowledge, as I see it, is inter- or trans-disciplinary. The field of knowledge is one. Nothing so befuddles us as the perverse concept that we should stick to a discipline (subject area, e.g., economics, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, physics).