Wealth, is wider and more complicated but if we narrow things to "money," there's an accounting tautology to take note of. You borrow a dollar from the bank. Y

Wealth, is wider and more complicated but if we narrow things to "money," there's an accounting tautology to take note of. You borrow a dollar from the bank. You buy something from me for a dollar. I put it in the bank. I have a dollar in the bank. You have -1 dollars, a debt to the bank. $0 net dollars between us. $0 average money-wealth. This is what most money is, debt. The average amount of debt-created money. If you keep borrowing from the bank, buying from me, and I keep putting money in the bank... both sides of our combined balance sheet will keep growing. For every dollar in my account, you will owe another dollar. The average & sum will always be 0. So.. if we are looking at just the money part of wealth, it never grows in total. If you borrowed to spend on consumption, then the story ends here. If you borrowed to buy non-money assets, then you still have those durables. For example, say you borrowed $1 to buy a house. I built it for you. I have a $1. You have -$1 and a $1 house. In reality, it's hard to differentiate between real assets and money assets. What is a security, really? This part gets hard so I'll leave it at that. The upshot is that a lot of our collective wealth adds up to $0. For every dollar someone somewhere has in the bank, someone else owes a dollar. In the currently prevailing banking/money/governance system, a lot of the debt is owed by governments so they take a big chunk of the negative side. This leaves more room for people to own rather than owe money. If you subtract each persons share of national debt from your median person, I would expect the number is negative.