On a winter morning in 1427, a Florentine merchant sits at his desk, updating the family’s account book. The numbers are modest: wheat stores, workshop tools, a few loans to neighbours, payments owed after the last wool shipment. Nothing about the ledger looks like “wealth” in the modern sense. But to him, and to his heirs, it is the ground on which a life can stand. It is protection against famine, a reserve for rebuilding after misfortune, and a way to ensure that a household can honour its obligations. Prosperity is possible only if this foundation is cared for.
Across centuries, households like this learned the same lesson. Wealth grows through effort, but it endures only through attention. When care lapses, fortunes disperse—sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. Historians such as Guido Alfani and Walter Scheidel have shown how often inherited wealth dissolves within two or three generations if its stewards fail to understand its fragility. And philosophers from Aristotle onward recognised that wealth has a purpose beyond accumulation: it is meant to support the life one hopes to live.
This older understanding sits beneath the modern vocabulary of investing. It suggests that the essential task is not to chase higher numbers, but to maintain the real conditions that allow a family, institution, or community to remain secure across time. That maintenance has always required judgment, restraint, and the willingness to see wealth not as something possessed, but as something entrusted.
The full essay below explores this idea in depth:
– how earlier societies conceived of wealth;
– why investing, at its core, is a form of stewardship;
– what modern economics reveals about what we are actually stewarding;
– and why meaningful care becomes impossible without the right measure.
