Read Piketty's Capital; there's a great discussion about how wealth has been held across several capitalist countries for the past 200-300 years. What's striki

Read Piketty's Capital; there's a great discussion about how wealth has been held across several capitalist countries for the past 200-300 years. What's striking is that the value of agricultural land in the US around 1700-1800 was, if memory served, something like 50% of aggregate US wealth, whereas today it's <1%, with the dominant portion being residential real estate and business equity (which includes commercial RE, I think). According to the book, US wealth is about 50/50 between those two categories. Which is all to say, land hasn't been that great of a bet growth-wise for the past 100 or so years in the US. I don't know how one would've fared over 700 years of Italian history, though. More broadly, I think the biggest determinant of wealth is one's attitude toward generation of income. In a capitalist economy, long-term wealth is generated by the acquisition, improvement, and operation of assets; it's the same deal whether you're a business owner/founder, investment banker doing leveraged buyouts, landlord, miner, whatever. Get assets (build/buy), work on them, then use them for income or sell them to buy other/more assets. Very different attitude toward income than "Get a job". I wonder how correlated attitude is with wealth?