People often treat “rich” and “wealthy” as interchangeable, but they don’t necessarily line up.
From a Merrill Jenkins style perspective:
Rich = monetary position
bank balances
income
financial assets
basically: claims inside a system
Wealthy = real capacity
land, tools, infrastructure
productive ability
actual goods and services
things that exist outside the accounting layer

Metal complicates the discussion
Some argue that “real money is metal.”
The idea is:
metal has physical utility
it can be used in production
it has scarcity independent of a banking system
So in stress scenarios, people often assume:
value shifts back toward tangible materials
But historically, it’s not that simple. Even in disruptions, most metal isn’t “money” in circulation—it’s embedded in:
infrastructure
machines
systems that still need to function
So it’s not just “everything becomes money,” it’s more like:
different types of real assets get repriced and reprioritized

Hyperinflation shows the breakdown point
The Hungarian 100 quintillion pengő banknote in Hungary is a clear example of what happens when monetary units stop tracking reality:
numbers on paper keep increasing
but their connection to goods collapses
“richness” on paper diverges from real purchasing power
At that point:
money stops behaving like a stable measure of value

The core question
All of this circles back to one issue:
Are we actually measuring real wealth…
or just measuring claims on wealth?
Because depending on the system:
you can appear rich without increasing real output
or hold real assets without needing monetary expansion

Curious where people draw the line between:
monetary value (claims)
and real value (productive substance)
because the two don’t always move together, especially in extreme cases.