That’s the traditional way to model things.

There’s another dimension that I find increasingly useful to look at.

Capital is infinitely scalable. One person can put $1 to work, or one person can $100 billion dollars to work.

Labor has a hard limit somewhere around 60-80 hours per week. One person cannot sustainably put more labor “to work” without capital. Labor is essentially time.

So you have time and money. But not all hours you spend are the same. You can spend an hour fixing your car, or painting your house. The net effect of that hour is to provide a bit of value for perhaps up to a dozen people.

Or you could spend an hour creating something that provides a bit of value many times into the future for thousands, millions, or billions of people.

One is not inherently better than the other, but one is inherently more economically valuable than the other.

So the lesson is if you are time rich but capital poor, and you want to get capital rich, you need to spend your time on things that provide a bit of value for an arbitrarily large number of people. In other words, one-to-many not one-to-one.

There’s an upper limit to how much money your labor can make working 1-to-1 or even 1-to-N where n is small. There’s no limit to how much money your labor can make when N is large.

How does that jive with the incredible salaries of elite professionals, like computer scientists, lawyers, doctors, CEO's, when compared with the rest of the population? I think the importance of the labor vs capital divide is being exaggerated by the very elites who are making out as bandits from their labor. It is one way to assuage a guilty conscience I suppose.

> How does that jive with the incredible salaries of elite professionals, like computer scientists, lawyers, doctors, CEO's, when compared with the rest of the population?

It is important to turn that high income into assets. Living on cashflow is a losing bet long-term.