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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Where exactly is the boundary on assets and liabilities that go into net worth?

Wherever you want! Or, more realistically, wherever the government agency you're dealing with wants to put it.

For instance, the sum total of all my future labor is valuable, and events in the present can increase or decrease that value, but it generally wouldn't be included in my net worth (except under the utilitarian accounting that some like to use in these circles).

When you apply for a home loan in the United States, it is common for lenders to ask for proof of salary in the form of paystubs or a contract. I doubt they think of it in terms of "net worth" (but I don't know, maybe they do?) but that is one way the anticipated sum of your future labor is sometimes used to gauge your worth. Actually there are some theorists out there doing research two steps removed from the current system of income tax. First remove: they think we should tax wealth additionally or instead. Second remove: they think that one form of wealth is natural talent, so we should find a way to tax e.g. naturally smart people to deprive them of the unequal advantage they have over others. While I am skeptical the idea will ever get traction outside the ivory towers of academia, there are definitely people out there who want to think about your net worth in terms of all your assets, including your anticipated labor and inherent talents.

Are valid sources of personal wealth just enumerated in a list somewhere?

There are many such lists. Here is one oriented toward business. Here is a list that explicitly excludes labor. Medicaid has its own list. Different states have different approaches to, e.g., the treatment of a university degree as a dividable asset in divorce proceedings.

There is, in other words, no Platonic ideal of "asset" which gets applied in every case, or even most cases. Whether you count someone's assets in a liberal or constrained way usually depends on what it is you're trying to accomplish. For example, I once heard of a case where the IRS valued a certain coin collection at "market value" for the purpose of measuring an estate's worth, but then seizing the coins and crediting only their face value against the defendant's tax bill. There is no such thing as objective valuation. There is only majority hashpower in the blockchain of life.