Layer 1 showed how physical resources turn into economic activity. But an economy doesn't only produce; over time it also accumulates income, assets, debt and claims.
What humanity really accumulates: housing and land piled up over generations, with a concentrated store of value beneath.
To see that accumulation, Layer 2 treats the world as a single company: a balance sheet and an income statement. The balance sheet: how much wealth exists, and how much of it is debt versus equity. The income statement: how income splits into wages, depreciation, taxes and net profit.
Here the scale shifts. On top of the physical and economic world sits a far larger world of financial claims that represents it; the world's net worth is more than 6,2× the income produced in a year.
The composition of that wealth has changed too: a thousand years ago it was entirely physical - land, animals, buildings; today about half is a claim on paper: shares, bonds, deposits, policies. The financial share was 15% a century ago, 50% today.
Layer 2's question is no longer “What do we produce?” but “What does what we produce turn into, and over whom does it create a claim?”
World total assets
1.906,87 T $
Everything real and financial, gross, before debts are netted out
World net worth
734,39 T $
What is left after debts; more than six times annual income
World GDP
118,18 T $
The annual flow L1 produces, the source that feeds this stock
Annual net profit
22,50 T $
What remains after wages, depreciation and taxes; the part that sticks to the balance sheet
Income → saving → wealth
Left: the five parts of income and their amounts. Middle: one year of world income. Right: the fate of that income - most is consumed or paid out within the year, the surplus that remains sticks to the balance sheet and accumulates.
Added to the balance sheetConsumed / paid
The world produces 118 T $ of income a year; most of it is consumed the same year as wages, capital wear, taxes and resource rent. What remains, 23 T $, sticks to the balance sheet. Do that for decades and the accumulated net worth today is 734 T $ - that is 6,2 times a year's income and 33 times a year's surplus. Of that wealth, 671 T $ is physical capital; 1.236 T $ of financial assets nets almost entirely against someone else's debt, so what carries net worth is physical capital.
More than half of accumulated wealth is real estate and land, the titling of coordinates on the Earth's surface. Most of the rest is equities, bonds and deposits: claims staked today on future flows of labour and energy. Wealth is mostly not a thing but a claim.
Critical rate asymmetry
Net wealth built up over centuries ($734 trillion) does not stay still: each year the markets turn over 13,3× its size.
Whose labour sits in which layer
0Extraction955 M · %27,1
1Economy2,5 bn · %70,6
2Wealth79 M · %2,3
3Markets5 M · %0,1
Layer 3 markets turn over about 82× world GDP in a year; the core workforce that runs them is roughly 1/191 the size of Layer 0's.
What's in this layer
Pages on how created value accumulates and in whose hands it collects.
