Owners of a golden asteroid could conceivably try to pull a similar trick, launching advertising campaigns to get people to start using gold for more things -- building materials, perhaps, or clothing. But it seems unlikely that they could persuade the world to pay a premium for the sheer volume of gold coming from an asteroid like 16 Psyche -- especially if a rival company showed up with another golden space rock.
The impossibility of extracting untold riches from 16 Psyche teaches two important lessons about how wealth really works. First, it shows that a great deal of wealth exists only on paper -- when you try to sell your assets, the price goes down. Liquidity -- the ability to sell an asset for cash -- is an important factor that tends to be forgotten when calculating net worth.
And second, this example shows that real wealth doesn’t actually come from golden hoards. It comes from the productive activities of human beings creating things that other human beings desire. De Beers’ fabulous fortunes ultimately came not from its control over a certain type of dazzling rock, but from its ability to convince the world that this rock could be used to communicate love and devotion.
If you want to get rich, don’t think about how to seize scarce resources. Think about how to use resources in an innovative way to make something people truly want or need.
Noah Smith is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.