India, Oct. 23 -- Let us examine two ongoing debates, one over the past three decades, and the other over the past 150 years. Ever since the individual net worth of the world's richest gripped our imaginations since the 1990s, we have been floored by the almost-simultaneous gains of some, and sensational billion-dollar drops within hours and days. For example, Tuesday's Forbes real-time list of billionaires shows that Larry Page of Google, and Francoise Bettencourt Meyers of L'Oreal lost almost $5 billion each on a single day. The world's richest, Elon Musk of Tesla, is worth nearly $500 billion. These mind-numbing numbers, which are largely on paper, dazzle our imaginations.

Since the late 1800s, the discussions among economists, within...