I think you're double counting the advantage for wealth if you consider resilience an advantage, but don't consider not spending money to be a disadvantage. Ke

I think you're double counting the advantage for wealth if you consider resilience an advantage, but don't consider not spending money to be a disadvantage. Keeping money reserved for hardships is a lot like having spent the money, since you can no longer use that money to increase your standard of living. If you put away $50,000 in case of job loss or health problems, you've bought resilience at the opportunity cost of $50,000 worth of something else. If you change your mind later and spend it, you just traded in your resilience for other goods and services. You have the benefit of resilience or the benefit of whatever else you might buy with that money, but not both at the same time. When you look at consumption numbers for a country, they already include what people have spent to deal with hardships. Wealth, however, doesn't tell you how much in poverty someone had to live in order to save that wealth. Insurance is a formal way of spending money on resilience. Insurance, though, has the advantage of pooling risk among a large number of people. You don't actually have to save up millions to be insured for millions in healthcare bills. Someone with excellent insurance but little savings can have both more resilience and a higher standard of living than someone who lives in poverty to save every penny, but doesn't spend on insurance.