Sometime in my pre-teens, I remember watching a silly made-for-kids movie on, I think, Nickelodeon.

Sometime in my pre-teens, I remember watching a silly made-for-kids movie on, I think, Nickelodeon. In it, there was a genie.

As genies do in made-for-kids movies, it granted a young man three wishes. His first wish was that he would have all the money in the world. So you saw all this paper fly into a barn on his farm and it was filled with money. It was all his.

This created considerably less chaos in the world of the film than it would have, but it was a problem. People in the town tried to invent new money, but — under the rules created by the genie’s magic — that just turned it into the rightful possession of the boy. All the money was his.

As ever, the moral was be careful what you wish for.

But I’ve remembered this story for 40 years for another reason: because it makes a great point. If all the money is held by one person, there is no point in money any longer. Money is how we collaborate without any meetings.

Wealth isn’t the same as money, but it’s close. If all the wealth belongs to a very few — and I mean a very, very few — then is there even any point in creating wealth any more?

What is wealth for?

—frontstageexit.com