Whither Surplus?

The political-economics of national productivity depends on the degree to which property rights are made to operate in the society. 

At the national scale all market production is a joint product: the value of the good depends both on (a) the tastes and preferences of the traders in the good as well as on (b) the degree to which the rights to the good needs to be defended. 

Gresham's Law defines information as that which couples the quality of the good to the value of the good. The resource curse defines alienability as that which couples the degree to which the agent is owned by his possessions rather than the other way around. The irony is the more a good is alienable, the more likely it will result in owning its consumer rather than being owned by him. 

Two definitions: we can define the welfare of agents according to how much they have available to themselves to consume; we can define the contentment of agents by how much of what's available do they own rather than are they owned by. How much discretion do they have in their lives versus how much of their lives are they compelled to follow because they are trapped in (even voluntary) servitude. 

Storing the value of the good in one's person as productive capacity and skill, i.e. as autonomy, is the most efficient way to own rather than to be owned by one's surplus. Contentment measures how much of you (what proportion of you) is enjoying the bounty; caring measures how much of you is there to do the enjoying. Uncaring people like Doris Duke are too small to deserve the surplus she commanded. 

Surplus should be used to enhance contentment – to transform itself into an autonomous version of itself – and to expand caring – to enable the growth of the agents who are becoming autonomous. 

The economics of abundance can be reduced to the question: Whither Surplus? Caring and contentment are measures of meaning rather than of worth. Liquidity is somehow  tied to meaning rather than worth. Worth drives the price while meaning drives whatever it is that determines liquidity.